Impact of COVID-19 Restrictions on the Social-Emotional Wellbeing of Preschool Children and Their Families

In the spring of 2020, as a result of the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many children dropped out of daycare and early education in Finland, and parents had to balance work and childcare for months. The wellbeing of families during the lockdown has been studied to some extent, but few studies have focused on children under school age. In May 2020, we sent a survey to the 82 families originally recruited in our study on supporting social-emotional development in early childhood education units, which had been interrupted by the pandemic. Twenty families responded to questionnaires about the impacts of the lockdown on the wellbeing of the children and their parents. Parents reported a decline in children’s prosocial behavior compared to the time before the pandemic and assessed that the children who stayed at home were lonelier than children who remained in daycare. Otherwise, being at home or in care was not associated with children’s physical or mental wellbeing. Parents had experienced increased mental strain and increased problems in marital relationships and the disruption of children’s participation in daycare was associated with deterioration in the parent–child relationship. Due to the small sample size, these results should be interpreted with caution

Effects of musical experience on children’s language and brain development

The present thesis investigated the maturation of children’s neural speech-sound discrimination, its links to behavioral linguistic measures and whether participating music playschool affects these skills. Neural speech-sound discrimination was studied by recording children’s (N=75) event-related potentials (ERP) to different speech-sound changes with electroencephalography (EEG), four times in a longitudinal setting starting at the age of 4 to 5. Similarly, children’s neurocognitive skills were assessed four times during the 20 months of the follow-up. Children attending music playschool were compared to children partaking in dance lessons or not attending either one of these activities. The results suggest that the 5–6-year-old children’s neural speech-sound discrimination reflected by their Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses has an association with phoneme processing skills. Larger MMN amplitudes were found for children scoring higher in Phoneme processing test. The intelligence measures were not associated with the brain responses. During the follow-up, children’s MMN, P3a and Late discriminative negativity (LDN) responses to phoneme deviations changed, reflecting maturation of auditory change detection. The amplitudes for the MMN response increased and for the LDN decreased for several speech-sound features. Furthermore, the P3a shifted towards adult-like positivity for some sound features. Thus, it seems that even for speech-sounds constantly heard in every-day life of children, the discrimination is still immature at the age of 5–6. The linguistic skills improved more for children partaking in music playschool than for children attending in dance lessons or not participating in either. The magnitude of improvement was dependent on the duration of participation and was evident for phoneme processing skills and vocabulary knowledge. Similar effects did not emerge for perceptual reasoning or inhibition skills. However, music playschool did not modulate children’s neural speech-sound discrimination, suggesting that the passively elicited neural modulation associated with the development of linguistic skills are not simplistically linked with the auditory detection of the speech-sound changes. The results highlight the usefulness of change- induced auditory ERPs in indexing i) linguistic skills and ii) maturation of neural auditory discrimination of speech-sounds in childhood, and further demonstrates iii) the beneficial role of structured but playful music sessions for children’s linguistic development.Väitöskirjassa tutkin 5–6-vuotiaiden lasten puheäänten havaitsemista ja sen yhteyksiä kielellisiin kykyihin. Selvitin myös musiikkileikkikouluun osallistumisen vaikutuksia näihin taitoihin. Tutkimuksessa mukana olevista 75 lapsesta osa osallistui musiikkileikkikouluun, osa tanssitunneille ja osa toimi ns. passiivisina kontrollilapsina. Lapsien aivovasteita puheäänten muutoksiin mitattiin neljä kertaa kahden vuoden aikana. Lisäksi lapset tekivät kielellisiä ja muita kognitiivisia taitoja mittaavia testejä. Kielelliset kyvyt kehittyivät nopeammin lapsilla, jotka osallistuivat musiikkileikkikouluun kuin muilla lapsilla. Kielellisten taitojen paraneminen näkyi äänteiden prosessointitaitoja ja sanavarastoa mittaavissa testeissä ja oli sidoksissa musiikkileikkikouluun osallistumisen kestoon. Musiikkileikkikoulu ei vaikuttanut ei-kielellistä älykkyyttä ja toiminnanohjauksen taitoja mittaavien testien tuloksiin, eikä myöskään muokannut lasten puheäänteiden muutosten erottelua aivoissa. Tutkimuksen aikana puheäänteiden muutosten erottelu aivoissa kehittyi. Näyttääkin siltä, että lasten kuuloerottelukyky kehittyy vielä 5–6-vuoden iässä päivittäin kuultavien puheäänten suhteen. Lisäksi tulosten mukaan lasten puheäänten erottelu aivoissa on yhteydessä kielellisiin taitoihin siten, että lapsilla, jotka suoriutuivat paremmin äänteiden prosessoinnin testistä, oli suuremmat aivovasteet puheäänten muutoksille. Väitöskirjani tulokset korostavat puheäänten muutoksien synnyttämien aivovasteiden käyttökelpoisuutta i) kielellisten taitojen ja ii) lasten kuuloerottelukyvyn kehityksen selvittämisessä sekä suosittelevat iii) lapsen kehitystason huomioon ottavan musiikkitoiminnan käyttämistä lasten kielellisen kehityksen tukemiseen

Perspectives on the Potential Benefits of Children’s Group-based Music Education

Corrigendum to “Perspectives on the Potential Benefits of Children's Group-based Music Education”: https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043211047636.Recent empirical evidence suggests that attending individual instrumental training in music schools benefits the development of cognitive skills such as language and executive functions. In this article, we examine studies that have found these transfer effects provided by group-based music education in school and preschool contexts. We conclude that group-based music lessons may enhance children’s language skills and possibly executive functions, but evidence for the impact of music activities on intelligence—as measured by nonverbal intelligence tests—or long-term prosocial abilities is scarce. Although the beneficial effects of music on language skills and executive functions are small, they seem to be discernible. However, we do not know if they apply to all children or only to, for example, children who enjoy engaging in musical activities. We suggest that group-based music education should be part of the national school and preschool curricula, because of both the enjoyment of learning music-related skills and the impact it may have on children’s general learning. In parallel, we encourage new empirical longitudinal projects to be launched, enabling further investigations into the promises of music.Recent empirical evidence suggests that attending individual instrumental training in music schools benefits the development of cognitive skills such as language and executive functions. In this article, we examine studies that have found these transfer effects provided by group-based music education in school and preschool contexts. We conclude that group-based music lessons may enhance children’s language skills and possibly executive functions, but evidence for the impact of music activities on intelligence—as measured by nonverbal intelligence tests—or long-term prosocial abilities is scarce. Although the beneficial effects of music on language skills and executive functions are small, they seem to be discernible. However, we do not know if they apply to all children or only to, for example, children who enjoy engaging in musical activities. We suggest that group-based music education should be part of the national school and preschool curricula, because of both the enjoyment of learning music-related skills and the impact it may have on children’s general learning. In parallel, we encourage new empirical longitudinal projects to be launched, enabling further investigations into the promises of music.Peer reviewe

SAGA-Supporting Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood Education: The Development of a Mentalizing-Based Intervention

The aim of the SAGA project is to support children’s social-emotional development and teacher mentalizing by promoting regular shared story-book reading with mentalizing dialogs in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. The theoretical phase, the modeling phase (Phase I), and the exploratory phase (Phase II) of the SAGA intervention, as well as the research protocol for the final trial (Phase III), are described in the present article

Maturation of Speech-Sound ERPs in 5-6-Year-Old Children : A Longitudinal Study

The maturation of 5-6-year-old children's auditory discrimination - indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) - has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children.Peer reviewe

Musiikin oppimisen siirtovaikutuksia

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Maturation of Speech-Sound ERPs in 5–6-Year-Old Children: A Longitudinal Study

The maturation of 5–6-year-old children’s auditory discrimination – indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) – has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children

SAGA-Supporting Social-Emotional Development in Early Childhood Education: The Development of a Mentalizing-Based Intervention

The aim of the SAGA project is to support children's social-emotional development and teacher mentalizing by promoting regular shared story-book reading with mentalizing dialogs in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. The theoretical phase, the modeling phase (Phase I), and the exploratory phase (Phase II) of the SAGA intervention, as well as the research protocol for the final trial (Phase III), are described in the present article

Children’s inhibition skills are associated with their P3a latency – results from an exploratory study

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