Vocabulary Growth in Late Talkers: Lexical Development from 2;0 to 3;0

Vocabulary growth from 2;0 to 3;0 was studied in 28 late talkers using expressive vocabulary inventories reported bimonthly on the Language Development Survey (LDS). Group milestones were 18 words at 2;0, 89 words at 2;6, and 195 words at 3;0. A sub-group of 11 children (Group I) showed a rapid vocabulary spurt between 2;2 and 2;8, reached the 150-180 word mark by 2;6, and attained the LDS ceiling of about 300 words by 2;10. In contrast, the 17 children in Group 2 still had a mean vocabulary of fewer than 30 words at 2;6, had less of a vocabulary spurt when they did start acquiring words, and attained the 150-180 vocabulary mark at 3;0. All 3;0 language outcome measures were significantly predicted by LDS vocabulary size from 2;2 to 2;4

From Lexical Tone to Lexical Stress: A Cross-Language Mediation Model for Cantonese Children Learning English as a Second Language

published_or_final_versio

Vocabulary Growth in Late Talkers: Lexical Development from 2;0 to 3;0

Vocabulary growth from 2;0 to 3;0 was studied in 28 late talkers using expressive vocabulary inventories reported bimonthly on the Language Development Survey (LDS). Group milestones were 18 words at 2;0, 89 words at 2;6, and 195 words at 3;0. A sub-group of 11 children (Group I) showed a rapid vocabulary spurt between 2;2 and 2;8, reached the 150-180 word mark by 2;6, and attained the LDS ceiling of about 300 words by 2;10. In contrast, the 17 children in Group 2 still had a mean vocabulary of fewer than 30 words at 2;6, had less of a vocabulary spurt when they did start acquiring words, and attained the 150-180 vocabulary mark at 3;0. All 3;0 language outcome measures were significantly predicted by LDS vocabulary size from 2;2 to 2;4

Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis: Infant word segmentation and vocabulary outcomes

Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two word segmentation tasks, varying in complexity, were administered in infancy and related to childhood outcome measures. Outcome measures consisted of age-normed productive vocabulary percentiles and a measure of cognitive development. Results demonstrated a strong degree of association between infant word segmentation abilities at 7 months and productive vocabulary size at 24 months. In addition, outcome groups, as defined by median vocabulary size and growth trajectories at 24 months, showed distinct word segmentation abilities as infants. These findings provide the first prospective evidence supporting the predictive validity of infant word segmentation tasks and suggest that they are indeed associated with mature word knowledge

Editorial: Lexical Tone Perception in Infants and Young Children: Empirical Studies and Theoretical Perspectives

10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01195Frontiers in Psychology10MAY119

The tone atlas of perceptual discriminability and perceptual distance: Four tone languages and five language groups

Available online 4 April 2022Some prior investigations suggest that tone perception is flexible, reasonably independent of native phonology, whereas others suggest it is constrained by native phonology. We address this issue in a systematic and comprehensive investigation of adult tone perception. Sampling from diverse tone and non-tone speaking communities, we tested discrimination of the three major tone systems (Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin) that dominate the tone perception literature, in relation to native language and language experience as well as stimulus variation (tone properties, presentation order, pitch cues) using linear mixed effect modelling and multidimensional scaling. There was an overall discrimination advantage for tone language speakers and for native tones. However, language- and tone-specific effects, and presentation order effects also emerged. Thus, over and above native phonology, stimulus variation exerts a powerful influence on tone discrimination. This study provides a tone atlas, a reference guide to inform empirical studies of tone sensitivity, both retrospectively and prospectively.Project conception (dB), and project management and data collection by the sixth author, BK, at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development in Sydney Australia were supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants (DP0988201, DP110105123) to the final author, dB. Data collection in Hong Kong was supported by Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation. Data collection at the National University of Singapore was supported by an ODPRT grant for research excellence to LS. LL’s writing was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 798658 hosted by Center for Multilingualism across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, financed by Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme grant agreement No. 223265. MK’s writing was supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship, PID2019-105528GA-I00, and by the Spanish State Research Agency through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010-S. We would like to thank Kay Wong for data collection in Hong Kong, Ms. Juthatip Duangmal and Ms. Nawasri Chonmahatrakul at MARCS-CILS NokHook BabyLab, Thammasat University for data collection in Thailand, Charlene Fu and Dilu Wewalaarachchi for data collection in Singapore; and Antonia Götz for discussions about analyses in R

Association of maternal Vitamin D status with glucose tolerance and caesarean section in a multi-ethnic Asian cohort: the growing up in Singapore towards healthy outcomes study

10.1371/journal.pone.0142239PLoS ONE10111-16GUSTO (Growing up towards Healthy Outcomes

A multilab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments

The Analysis of Teaching of Medical Schools (AToMS) survey: an analysis of 47,258 timetabled teaching events in 25 UK medical schools relating to timing, duration, teaching formats, teaching content, and problem-based learning.

BACKGROUND: What subjects UK medical schools teach, what ways they teach subjects, and how much they teach those subjects is unclear. Whether teaching differences matter is a separate, important question. This study provides a detailed picture of timetabled undergraduate teaching activity at 25 UK medical schools, particularly in relation to problem-based learning (PBL). METHOD: The Analysis of Teaching of Medical Schools (AToMS) survey used detailed timetables provided by 25 schools with standard 5-year courses. Timetabled teaching events were coded in terms of course year, duration, teaching format, and teaching content. Ten schools used PBL. Teaching times from timetables were validated against two other studies that had assessed GP teaching and lecture, seminar, and tutorial times. RESULTS: A total of 47,258 timetabled teaching events in the academic year 2014/2015 were analysed, including SSCs (student-selected components) and elective studies. A typical UK medical student receives 3960 timetabled hours of teaching during their 5-year course. There was a clear difference between the initial 2 years which mostly contained basic medical science content and the later 3 years which mostly consisted of clinical teaching, although some clinical teaching occurs in the first 2 years. Medical schools differed in duration, format, and content of teaching. Two main factors underlay most of the variation between schools, Traditional vs PBL teaching and Structured vs Unstructured teaching. A curriculum map comparing medical schools was constructed using those factors. PBL schools differed on a number of measures, having more PBL teaching time, fewer lectures, more GP teaching, less surgery, less formal teaching of basic science, and more sessions with unspecified content. DISCUSSION: UK medical schools differ in both format and content of teaching. PBL and non-PBL schools clearly differ, albeit with substantial variation within groups, and overlap in the middle. The important question of whether differences in teaching matter in terms of outcomes is analysed in a companion study (MedDifs) which examines how teaching differences relate to university infrastructure, entry requirements, student perceptions, and outcomes in Foundation Programme and postgraduate training