Children’s language abilities predict success in remote communication contexts

Remote communicative contexts are part of everyday social, familial, and academic interactions for the modern child. We investigated the ability of second-graders to engage in remote discourse, and we determined which of several abilities—language, theory of mind, and temperament—predicted their success. Fifty 7-to-9-year-old monolingual English speakers with a wide range of language abilities participated in standardized testing and an expository discourse task in which they taught two adults to solve the Tower of London, one in simulated video chat and a second in a simulated phone condition. The discourse was scored for the inclusion of 15 items deemed relevant to the explanation. Children included from 27% to 87% of the items. They communicated more information via gesture than spoken word in both conditions. They included more spoken information in the phone condition than the video condition and more information overall in the phone condition. Performance was positively associated with spoken language ability. There was no relationship between performance and theory of mind, temperament, ability to solve the Tower of London, age, or sex. We conclude that 7-to-9-year-olds adjust the modality and content of their message to suit their remote partner's needs, but their success in remote discourse contexts varies greatly from individual to individual. Children with below-average language skills are at risk for functional impairments in remote communication

A spatially supported forced-choice recognition test reveals children’s long-term memory for newly learned word forms

Children’s memories for the link between a newly trained word and its referent have been the focus of extensive past research. However, memory for the word form itself is rarely assessed among preschool-age children. When it is, children are typically asked to verbally recall the forms, and they generally perform at floor on such tests. To better measure children’s memory for word forms, we aimed to design a more sensitive test that required recognition rather than recall, provided spatial cues to off-set the phonological memory demands of the test, and allowed pointing rather than verbal responses. We taught 12 novel word-referent pairs via ostensive naming to sixteen 4-to-6-year-olds and measured their memory for the word forms after a week-long retention interval using the new spatially-supported form recognition test. We also measured their memory for the word-referent links and the generalization of the links to untrained referents with commonly used recognition tests. Children demonstrated memory for word forms at above chance levels; however, their memory for forms was poorer than their memory for trained or generalized word-referent links. When in error, children were no more likely to select a foil that was a close neighbor to the target form than a maximally different foil. Additionally, they more often selected correct forms that were among the first six than the last six to be trained. Overall, these findings suggest that children are able to remember word forms after a limited number of ostensive exposures and a long-term delay. However, word forms remain more difficult to learn than word-referent links and there is an upper limit on the number of forms that can be learned within a given period of time

A story about a word: does narrative presentation promote learning of a spatial preposition in German two-year-olds?

Nachtigäller K, Rohlfing K, McGregor KK. A story about a word: does narrative presentation promote learning of a spatial preposition in German two-year-olds? Journal of Child Language. 2013;40(04):900-917.We trained forty German-speaking children aged 1;8–2;0 in their comprehension of UNTER [UNDER]. The target word was presented within semantically organized input in the form of a ‘narrative’ to the experimental group and within ‘unconnected speech’ to the control group. We tested children’s learning by asking them to perform an UNDER-relation before, immediately after, and again one day after the training using familiarized and unfamiliarized materials. Compared to controls, the experimental group learned better and retained more. Children with advanced expressive lexicons in particular were aided in generalizing to unfamiliarized materials by the narrative presentation. This study extends our understanding of how narrations scaffold young children’s enrichment of nascent word knowledge

Socio-pragmatics and attention: Contributions to gesturally guided word learning in toddlers

Booth AE, McGregor KK, Rohlfing K. Socio-pragmatics and attention: Contributions to gesturally guided word learning in toddlers. Journal of Language Learning and Development. 2009;4(3):179-202