Please note that the order of presentation within sessions will be different.
07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P018
The interplay of grammatical gender and gender-stereotypical color in toddler word recognition
Nicole Altvater-Mackensen; Lisa Kohl; Nicole Altvater-Mackensen
“It has been shown that toddlers recruit stereotypical gender information during language processing: in a classical preferential looking task, they are faster to recognize a gender stereotypically colored object, e.g., a pink bib, if it is labeled by a gender-matching (female) compared to a mismatching (male) voice (Bacon & Saffran, 2022). The current study investigates whether color and grammatical gender information similarly interact during word recognition in German, a language with grammatical gender marking (e.g., der Hut – theMASC hat vs. die Kappe – theFEM cap).
We present word pairs differing in grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) in three different conditions in a preferential looking task with 3- to 6-year-old children and a comparable forced-choice task in adults: consistent trials present a stereotypical pairing of grammatical gender and object color (e.g., a blue hatMASC and a red capFEM); in inconsistent trials grammatical gender and object color oppose a stereotypical pairing (e.g. a red hatMASC and a blue capFEM); and in neutral trials the color of the objects is gender-neutral (e.g., a yellow hatMASC and a green capFEM). Based on previous work, we speculate that inconsistent trials will lead to disrupted word recognition compared to neutral trials while consistent trials will show improved word recognition compared to neutral trials.
Data collection for the child sample just finished (N = 26). Data from adults shows faster reaction times when grammatical gender match the stereotypical object color compared to when they mismatch (t (25) = -2.398, p = .024). The neutral condition showed in-between reaction times with no significant differences compared to consistent and inconsistent trials. So far, results suggest that linguistic (grammatical gender) and extra-linguistic (stereotypical color) information interact during word recognition, extending previous findings that listeners integrate a range of different linguistic and non-linguistic cues to facilitate language processing.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P018
Early development of inferential comprehension in French-speaking preschoolers from the ELLAN study
Pamela Filiatrault-Veilleux; Audette Sylvestre; Chantal Desmarais
“Background: Inferential comprehension is a complex language ability fundamental for social competence and reading comprehension. Evidence from the literature demonstrate that inference generation develops early in a child’s life. Additionally, recent findings report greater difficulties in inferencing in preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorders and young autistic children compared to same age typically developing peers when using narrative-based comprehension tasks. However, no longitudinal study has yet been conducted to investigate inferential comprehension development in young typically developing children.
Objective: Using a longitudinal design, this study aims to describe the development of inferential comprehension abilities in young typically developing French-speaking children from 42 to 66 months of age.
Methods: A narrative-based inferential comprehension task has been administered to a group of typically developing children (n=71-91) at 42, 54 and 66 months old; as part of the Early Longitudinal Language and Neglect [ELLAN] study. A total of 19 inferential questions were classified into six types of causal inferences targeting story grammar elements. Children’s responses were scored on a quality continuum ranging from expected (3 points) to inadequate (0 point).
Results: Inferential comprehension total scores significantly improve between T1 and T2 and between T2 and T3 (p < 0.001). Results permit the description of a developmental sequence per inference types and a progression in quality of children’s responses. By 54-month-old, children can answer inferential questions targeting the problem and solution of the story, as questions targeting the goal and internal responses are better answered at 66-month-old. At 42-month-old, children’s responses to the inferential questions were scored as expected in a proportion of 10.9%, in comparison to 39.2% at 52-month-old and 52.0% at 66-month-old.
Conclusion: Such longitudinal data documenting an evidence-based developmental sequence of inferential comprehension is essential to design language intervention targeting receptive language of young children experiencing language difficulties from an early age.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P018
Feasibility of an online language intervention and the impact of dose frequency manipulation.
Pauline Frizelle; Eva McMullan; Darren Dahly; Eibhlín Looney; Ciara O’Toole; Nicola Hart
“Background: Few studies have explored the feasibility of online language interventions for young children with Down syndrome (DS). Additionally, none have manipulated dose frequency or reported on the use of music as a medium through which language and sign can be learned.
Aims: To 1) examine the feasibility and acceptability of an online language intervention for young children (1 – 3;06 years) with DS, and 2) compare effectiveness at two intervention dose frequencies.
Method: The study was carried out in two phases using a mixed methods design. Phase 1: qualitative data were gathered to examine feasibility issues when implementing a video-based language intervention at home. Phase 2: effectiveness of the intervention was examined comparing two groups, randomly assigned to a high and low intervention dose frequency. The Down syndrome Education checklists (combined) were the primary outcome measure. Process data were gathered to determine the acceptability of the intervention in practice and to identify factors that would improve successful future implementation. Acceptability data were analysed with reference to the theoretical framework of acceptability (V2).
Results: Forty-three parents completed the phase 1 survey, five of whom took part in the focus groups. Once weekly sessions in the morning were indicated as the preferred scheduling choice. Quantitative data were analysed using Beta regression adjusted for baseline scores and indicated better end-of-study outcomes in the low dose group. However, an exploratory interaction model suggested that the the efficacy of the high-dose intervention was higher in participants with higher baseline DSE performance (>6%). Parents perceived the intervention to be effective and noted a positive cascading effect on the family.
Conclusions: The results of this study add to our knowledge of real-world effective online-interventions and suggest a critical minimum language level is required for children with DS to benefit optimally from a higher intervention dose.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P018
The Role of Infants’ Point-Following on the Link between Mothers’ Pointing and Infants’ Vocabulary
Sura Ertaş; Ebru Ger; Sümeyye Koşkulu-Sancar; Aylin C. Küntay
“Parents’ pointing predicts infants’ language development. However, the relevance of infants’ point-following skills in this predictive relation has not been studied. The present study examined whether mothers’ pointing frequency at 12 months predicts their infants’ receptive vocabulary at 14 months and whether infants’ point-following skills at 12 months moderate this relationship.
We examined 42 Turkish-speaking mother-infant dyads when the infants were 12 and 14 months old. We measured mothers’ pointing frequency using the decorated room paradigm (Liszkowski 2012) and infants’ point-following performance using the point-following paradigm (Mundy et al. 2003), wherein two front and two behind trials infants were to follow the point to a picture hung on the wall. Given that the majority of infants could follow pointing in the front trials, we only focused on point-following in the behind trials. We categorized the infants as ‘follower’ if they succeeded at least on one of the behind trials, and as ‘non-follower’ otherwise. We assessed infants’ receptive vocabulary using the Turkish Communicative Development Inventory-I at 14 months.
We regressed infants’ receptive vocabulary scores at 14 months on mothers’ pointing frequency at 12 months, infants’ point-following category at 12 months, and their interaction. We found a significant interaction effect (β=6.47, 95% CI [2.14, 10.79], p=.004). Mothers’ pointing frequency at 12 months was predictive of infants’ word comprehension at 14 months only for infants who were ‘followers’ of pointing (β=3.88, SE=1.57, p=.018).
Our findings demonstrate the role of infants’ point-following skills in the relationship between maternal pointing and infants’ subsequent vocabulary. Infants who have advanced point-following skills might be better able to benefit from mothers’ pointing to develop word comprehension skills, potentially by paying more attention to the pointed objects and to the labels or descriptions of these objects.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P018
ManyBabies-AtHome Looking While Listening: An online, cross-linguistic word recognition study
Katie Von Holzen
“The majority of knowledge produced in developmental science comes from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic; Singh et al., 2021), a bias which threatens to limit our understanding of the factors influencing early development. One promising solution to improve diversity, moving data collection to online, remote options, has so far not lived up to its promise, as the majority of online, remote studies are centered in the United States (Zaadnoordijk & Cusack, 2022). The ManyBabies-AtHome (MBAH) project aims to produce a resource-friendly, open-source, and accessible approach to make it possible for online studies to live up to their promise of increasing diversity (Zaadnoordijk et al., 2021). As a part of MBAH, the current study aims to investigate and establish best practices in the study infants’ word recognition development using an online, remote version of the Looking-While-Listening paradigm (LWL; Fernald, Zangl, Portillo, & Marchman, 2008). Cross-linguistic studies using this paradigm are rare (e.g. Ramon-Casas et al., 2009) and experimental design and analytic decisions vary considerably between studies (Zettersten, et al., 2021), rendering comparisons difficult or even making them impossible.
We will discuss our project goals as well as the state of the project. Our goals are four-fold: 1) Societal: Attract a more diverse set of researchers and study populations using a linguistically-inclusive and resource-friendly approach; 2) Theoretical: Investigate the development of infant word recognition abilities in a linguistically diverse sample; 3) Methodological: Determine the comparability of results produced in-lab with online, remote implementations of the LWL paradigm; and 4) Scientific: Generate an extensive dataset to train automatic eye gaze algorithms and for future researchers to plan their studies. We plan to submit our Registered Report by early 2024 and will look to recruit researcher-collaborators from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds at the IASCL 2024 Congress.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Studies too heterogeneous for meta-analysis? Try Bayesian evidence synthesis!
Elise van Wonderen; Mariëlle Zondervan-Zwijnenburg; Irene Klugkist
“In the field of child language, as well as in (experimental) psychology and linguistics more broadly, direct replications are rare and studies are often highly diverse in terms of their research design, participant characteristics or operationalization of key variables. This poses a challenge for quantitatively synthesizing results across studies, as the most popular method to do this (meta-analysis) requires conceptually comparable effect sizes with the same statistical form (e.g., Lipsey & Wilson, 2001). This requirement places considerable constraints on the studies that can be combined and entails that meta-analysis is sometimes not possible or that not all relevant studies can be included. In such situations, Bayesian evidence synthesis (Klugkist & Volker, 2023) may constitute a flexible alternative: this method combines studies at the hypothesis level rather than at the level of the effect size and therefore poses fewer constraints on the studies to be combined. An additional advantage is that Bayesian evidence synthesis allows for simultaneously testing multiple informative hypotheses that, unlike the conventional null hypothesis, can directly test a specific theory or hypothesis (Klugkist et al., 2005).
In this study, we introduce Bayesian evidence synthesis and show through simulations when this method diverges from what would be expected in a meta-analysis to help researchers correctly interpret the synthesis results. In our simulations, we investigated different scenarios by varying the number of studies synthesized, the studies’ sample sizes and effect sizes, and the between-study variance in effect sizes. The simulations showed that Bayesian evidence synthesis converges on the same hypothesis as meta-analysis in most scenarios. However, when many of the primary studies are underpowered, testing against the null hypothesis can be problematic. In those cases it may therefore be better to either not use Bayesian evidence synthesis or to only test hypotheses that are not a null hypothesis.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Looking-while-listening validization study of the Czech CDI:WG and CDI:WS with 164 toddlers
Nikola Paillereau; Filip Smolík; Tereza Sloupová; Katerina Chladkova; Jiří Pešek; Tereza Fialová; Šárka Kadavá
“The MacArthur-Bates CDIs are assessment tools that have been validated through comparison with various measures. Some rare studies have established connections between parent-reported vocabulary and real-time measures of word comprehension using looking-while-listening.
To obtain validation data for the Czech CDI:WG and CDI:WS, we conducted a looking-while-listening comprehension experiment involving 164 Czech children. Three different versions of the experiment (40, 60, or 80 items), were presented using the Eyelink 1000+ eyetracker to four age groups: A) 7-10 months old (N=30), 40 items; B) 15-17 months old (N=42), 60 items; C) 18-19 months old (N=46), 60 items; D) 20-30 months old (N=46), 80 items. Children were shown a pair of pictures and heard a sentence containing a noun labeling one of the pictures. Each pair was shown twice, with each picture as the target once.
We present the following statistical analyses:
- Permutation analyses: These examined the effects of vocabulary scores on the proportion of fixations on the target picture within each 100-ms time bin within 3 seconds after the word onset. In groups B, C, D, significant sequences were observed (B: 1.5-2.8s after word onset, p=0.008; C: 1.4-2.1s, p=0.034; D: 0.8-1.6s, p=0.018). In group A, no significant sequence was found.
- Binomial Generalized Additive Mixed Models: These tested the interaction effect of time after word onset and the child’s vocabulary on the probability of fixating on the target word. In all groups, this interaction was found to be significant with p<0.001. Increases in target fixations occurred faster in children with higher vocabulary scores in all groups, although the effects were more variable in younger children.
In sum, children with higher vocabulary scores exhibited faster or more frequent fixations on the targets, with some unexpected effects in the youngest group. This experimental study shows that the Czech CDIs are valid assessement tools.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Validation of computerised adaptive CDIs in Polish
Karolina Muszyńska; Grzegorz Krajewski; Piotr Król; Ewa Haman
“Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are widely used in research on language development in young children. However, CDI lists include hundreds of words and many attempts are made to create shortened versions. Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) enables shortening a CDI while retaining its accuracy. In CAT, the participant is presented with one item at a time, and their response allows the CAT algorithm to estimate the language ability and choose the next item to re-evaluate this estimate.
Here we will present results from an ongoing validation study of two Polish CAT CDIs: Words and Sentences (WS) for parents of children aged 19-36 months and Words and Gestures (WG) for parents of children aged 16-18 months. The estimate from the CAT CDI can be correlated with the score from the full-item CDI. So far, parents of 88 children filled in both a full-item CDI and a CAT CDI (target sample is 100 children per CDI version). The testing is done online, with the use of a web app, and the time between the testings ranges from 1 to 10 days. Correlations between the score from the full-item version and the CAT CDI were: r = 0.89 for WS (n = 72), r = 0.81 for WG word understanding, r = 0.57 for WG word production, and r = 0.92 for WG gestures (however, the sample size for WG is currently relatively small, n = 16). The WS correlations are similar to those reported in the only other big-scale validation study so far (r = 0.86 for American English WS, Kachergis et al., 2022). We will also explore parental consistency in selecting particular words across the two versions and report discrepancies. Since the data will include both monolingual and bilingual children, we will also compare the CAT validity between the two groups.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Bilinguals reach language milestones at similar age as monolingual peers: a study on parental report
Karolina Muszyńska; Katie Alcock; Agnieszka Dynak; Nina Gram Garmann; Pernille Hansen; Napoleon Katsos; Joanna Kolak-Rodis; Grzegorz Krajewski; Magdalena Krysztofiak; Magdalena Łuniewska; Anna Sara H. Romøren; Hanne Gram Simonsen; Krzysztof Sobota; Ewa Haman
“AIM. Establishing developmental trajectories in bilingual language acquisition is crucial to determine which individual patterns are typical in the population. We investigate the age of reaching language milestones, i.e. the age of babbling, producing first 1, 10, 50 words, combining words into sentences, in bilingual children from 0 to 3 years of age, and compare the age of reaching the milestones between (a) bilinguals and monolinguals, (b) across the two languages of the bilinguals.
METHODS. Information on the age of children reaching these milestones is gathered with a mobile app designed for the purposes of the study (“StarWords – every word counts”) in which parents provide information on their child’s development and enter gestures, words and utterances their child produces.
RESULTS. Final results of the project are based on 302 bilingual children (with Polish as L1, various L2s, living outside of Poland) and 302 matched Polish monolingual children, from 0 to 3 years. We found that bilingual children reached all the reported milestones at a similar age to their monolingual peers. We also compared bilingual children in the age of reporting their first word and first 10 words in L1 (Polish) or L2 (English / Norwegian / other). Bilinguals did not differ in the mean age of first word nor 10th word in their two languages. We also evaluate the usefulness of online data collection methods to study early language development. For example, though over 6,000 users downloaded the app, some comparisons (especially in L1 vs. L2 of bilinguals) could not be performed due to low user retention.
CONCLUSIONS. Our results confirm, on a relatively big sample and with a wide range of investigated milestones, that typical bilingual development may follow a similar trajectory as monolingual development. They also show the opportunities and challenges of data collection using mobile apps.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Peer interactions in linguistically diverse toddler groups: A social network study
Anne-Mieke Thieme; Sible Andringa; Josje Verhagen; Folkert Kuiken
“Peer interactions contribute to young children’s linguistic, social and cognitive development (Coplan & Arbeau, 2009). However, the literature suggests that multilingual children might experience fewer peer interactions in early childhood groups, especially if they have lower majority language proficiency or communicative competence (Dominguez & Trawick-Smith, 2018; Van der Wilt, 2018). They might instead be able to connect with same-language peers (Halle et al., 2014; Kyratzis, 2010). Research in linguistics has long recognised the importance of social networks (Milroy, 1980), but few studies have used the latest advances in social network analysis to statistically model the structure of a social network. The goal of the present study was to use these novel techniques to examine how toddlers’ linguistic repertoires relate to who they interact with and how much.
We observed 17 linguistically diverse playgroups for toddlers (2-3 years old) in the Netherlands. A specifically developed social network analysis app (CSNA) was used to assess with whom children interacted, and for how long. Alongside the app, multilingual parent and teacher questionnaires were employed to gather background information about the children and groups. The data were analysed with novel generalized exponential random graph models (Cranmer, Desmarais & Morgan, 2021). Our preliminary results, based on 11 playgroups (604 dyads), showed large variation between groups. In some groups, children with higher Dutch proficiency or communicative competence had more peer interactions, while in other groups, we did not find such effects. In some groups, children played more with peers who had similar linguistic repertoires, while in other groups, the reverse was true. We will discuss factors that may have led to these results, such as centres’ language policies and group composition. We will also discuss how the latest advances in social network analysis open up new possibilities for researchers in child multilingualism, and linguistics more broadly.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Who’s next? Turn anticipation in Dutch preschoolers with and without Developmental Language Disorder
Imme Lammertink; Caroline Rowland; Marisa Casillas
“By age two, children are remarkably good conversationalists: in overheard conversation, they spontaneously predict upcoming responses (Casillas & Frank, 2017; Lammertink et al., 2015), indicating sophistication with tracking conversational structure. However, children are not born with this ability and we do not yet know how they learn to recognize when and how a response is needed. In particular, we do not know how children’s developing linguistic knowledge impacts their real-time prediction of conversational structure. We examined this issue with Dutch-acquiring children—typically developing (TD) and with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)—to ask how lexicosyntactic (subject-verb inversion, question words; Studies 2 and 3), prosodic (rising vs. falling intonation; all studies), and epistemic (first vs. second person subject pronoun; Study 1) cues influence children’s turn-taking predictions.
We tracked the eyes of 445 Dutch-learning children as they watched short cartoon dialogues (Study 1: N = 320 TD children at 12, 24, 36, and 24 months, 80 per age-group; Study 2: N = 106 TD children at 48 months; Study 3: N = 19 children with a suspicion of DLD at age 3 and N = 19 age-matched TD controls). Participants saw dialogues in Dutch (all studies) or Jabberwocky Dutch (Studies 1 and 2), in which content words were replaced with legal nonsense words.
Children with and without DLD anticipated more speaker switches for questions than non-questions, demonstrating that both groups use subject-verb inversion and rising intonation to predict conversational structure (Studies 1 and 3). Study 1 additionally showed that TD children’s use of epistemic cues to predict conversational structure may rely on semantic context: in real Dutch, but not Jabberwocky, TD children anticipate speaker switches more often after hearing a second- versus first-person pronoun. Study 2 analyses are underway. We discuss the theoretical and clinical implications of these outcomes.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P104
Learners restrict their linguistic generalizations using preemption but not entrenchment
Ben Ambridge
“A central goal in the study of child language is explaining how, when learners generalize to new cases, they appropriately restrict their generalizations to avoid producing ungrammatical utterances (e.g., *The clown laughed the man). The past 30 years have seen an unresolved debate between statistical preemption and entrenchment as explanations. Under preemption, the use of a verb in a particular construction (e.g., *The clown laughed the man) is probabilistically blocked by hearing that verb other constructions with similar meanings ONLY (e.g., The clown made the man laugh). Under entrenchment, such errors (e.g., *The clown laughed the man) are probabilistically blocked by hearing ANY utterance that includes the relevant verb (e.g., by both The clown made the man laugh AND The man laughed). Across five artificial-language-learning studies with adults and children, we designed a training regime such that learners received evidence for the (by the relevant hypothesis) ungrammaticality of a particular unattested verb/noun+particle combination (e.g., *chila+kem; *squeako+kem) via either preemption only or entrenchment only. Three studies focussed on overgeneralizations of causative-marking verb argument structure (e.g., The man laughed / *The clown laughed the man / The clown made the man laugh); two on morphological overgeneralizations of plural marking (e.g., one mouse / *two mouses / two mice).
Across all five studies, participants in the preemption condition (as per our preregistered prediction) rated unattested verb/noun+particle combinations as less acceptable for restricted verbs/nouns, which appeared during training, than for unrestricted, novel-at-test verbs/nouns, which did not (i.e., strong evidence for preemption; all Bayes Factors > 10). Participants in the entrenchment condition showed no evidence for such an effect (and in 3/5 experiments, Bayesian evidence for the null). We conclude that a successful model of learning linguistic restrictions must instantiate competition between different forms ONLY where they express the same (or similar) meanings.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P131
Morpho-Syntactic Abilities of Heritage Bilinguals and Monolinguals: Is the Role of Age Overrated?
Petra Schulz; Christos Makrodimitris
“Our study examines the role of chronological age for the morpho-syntactic abilities of heritage Greek children compared to their monolingual peers. While there is consensus that development is generally connected to chronological age, its significance for heritage language (HL) development is unresolved. Morpho-syntactic abilities have been shown to improve with age in monolingual and in child L2 acquisition. HL learners, acquiring their L1(=HL) in a bilingual context, should show the same pattern, but findings are mixed. It has been argued that later exposure to the societal language, often captured as Age of Onset of bilingualism (L2-AoO), is more crucial in HL development than age: a higher L2-AoO should boost HL development, because the initial period of exclusive HL exposure allows learners to stabilize their HL abilities.
To evaluate the importance of age (vs. L2-AoO), we compared HL to monolingual children, comprising the same age range, 6-12yrs. 52 HL-Greek children (L2-AoO: 0;0-6;9 years) and 60 monolingual Greek children were tested with the Greek LITMUS sentence repetition task (SRT), targeting central morpho-syntactic structures. Children also completed a forward digit-recall task, to see how SRT is effected by short-term memory.
Separate GLMMs showed that Age and digit-recall predicted SRT-performance in the monolingual group, while in the HL-group SRT-performance was predicted by L2-AoO and digit-recall, but not by age.
The monolingual and HL children were very similar: they acquired the same L1, came from the same age group, and their performance was partly modulated by short-term memory. Nevertheless, we found that chronological age drives the acquisition of morpho-syntax in monolinguals, but not in HL-children. The later their exposure to the societal language, the better the HL abilities, and this effect was independent of age: thus, the role of age for HL children is overrated. We will discuss implications for the role of cumulative input.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P131
Oral narrative development in school-age learners of Mandarin
Xuening Zhang; Ziyin Mai
“Studies on development of narrative skills in children have documented clear age effects in both monolinguals and bilinguals, yet the findings have mostly focused on Indo-European languages and children aged 3 to 7 (e.g., Bonifacci et al., 2018). This gap motivates this exploratory corpus study on narrative development of school-age Mandarin learners in Hong Kong, investigating how narrative skills could be predicted by lower-level language skills such as phonological awareness, vocabulary, and grammar.
The sample comprises 788 Hong Kong Mandarin learners aged 8-14, who performed in timed narrative tasks (picture-based storytelling/personal recounts) as part of a widely taken Putonghua proficiency test: 279 younger primary students (Mage = 9.20), 413 older primary students (Mage =10.45), and 96 secondary students (Mage = 12.73). Narratives were analyzed for macrostructure based on story grammar, for general microstructure by computing the total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), and mean length of utterance in words (MLUw), and for fine-grained microstructure based on 17 structures of Mandarin outlined in Hao et al. (2019).
A preliminary analysis revealed stability of macrostructure across three age groups, consistent with previous findings of adult-like macrostructure performance in most 9-year-olds. Significant development was observed for microstructure measures heavily reliant on lexical skills (i.e., TNW, NDW, locative phrase, adjective, adverb, resultative verb compounds) between younger and older primary groups. Additional significant improvement in secondary schoolers was found only for resultative verb compounds, probably attributable to the inherent complexity of this structure which requires cumulative experience with Mandarin over school years. Meanwhile, scores in independent pronunciation, vocabulary choice and grammatical judgment tasks in the same proficiency test consistently predicted narrative outcome measures. Our findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of narrative development in school-age Mandarin learners, providing the missing link between preschool and adult narrators.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P131
Within and Across-Language Priming Trajectories Across Development in a Structurally Biased Language
Alina Kholodova; Michelle Peter; Caroline Rowland; Gunnar Jacob; Shanley Allen
“Abstract priming is the tendency to reproduce previously heard structures (Bock, 1986) and is enhanced when the verb is repeated across prime and target (i.e., lexical boost; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Further, priming can lead to structural adaptation across time (i.e., cumulative priming; Jaeger & Snider). However, there is extremely little research on these core effects across development in bilingual children both within and across languages as well as conflicting research in monolingual children. Besides, we lack research on these effects in languages where the two structural alternatives behave differently in bias strength leading to prediction error for infrequent structures (Chang et al., 2000; 2006).
In the present study, we studied core priming effects across growing age (3-4, 5-6, 7-8 and adults) in German speakers (N=193), in bilingual German speakers with a different L1 (N=164) within German and extended this study to prime English-German speaking bilinguals across the two languages. The participants described video clips with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit – DO) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots – PO). Crucially, in contrast to English, German is a DO biased language in which children hardly ever produce POs.
Within German, we found adaptation effects immediately and across time for the PO (but not for the DO) structure across all age groups in both monolingual and bilingual children with the highest effects in the youngest children due to more prediction error (in line with Chang., 2000; 2006). The lexical boost effect emerged across development. Preliminary results for priming from English to German in adults (N=25) show the opposite pattern: more adaptation for the DO structure which is the somewhat less preferred option in English and surprisingly no lexical boost effect. We intend to discuss our results within the framework of current priming accounts.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P131
The mechanisms underlying learning to listen and read in two languages
Kristi Hendrickson; Hector Sanchez-Melendez; Stephanie De Anda
“Adult bilinguals demonstrate non-selective lexical access (e.g., Dijkstra, & Van Heuven, 2022); upon hearing a Spanish word (e.g., dormir), Spanish-English bilinguals co-activate words that begin the same within a language (e.g., dorar) and across languages (e.g., doorway). However, extant research focuses on spoken words. Little is known about cross-language activation during reading. Moreover, although extant literature focuses on adults who have mastered reading in one or two languages, it remains unclear how children navigate cross-language competition when they are actively learning to read. The current study evaluates within- and cross-language lexical co-activation in the spoken and written modalities in adults vs. children.
Spanish-English bilingual adults (n=30) reported currently using both languages with equal frequency, whereas children (n=21) reported using English more often. Using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm (Allopenna et al., 1998) participants heard or saw a word and clicked the corresponding picture from a display of four: the target, a cross-language competitor, and two unrelated items. The difference in peak looks to competitors vs. unrelated items was evaluated.
For spoken words, adults showed cross-language activation only when listening in English (p=.006), whereas children showed cross-language activation only when listening in Spanish (p=.01). For written words, adults did not demonstrate cross-language competition in either language, whereas children showed cross-language competition when reading in Spanish (p=.003).
Results suggest that bilingual children activate their dominant language (English) while listening and reading in their non-dominant language (Spanish). However, highly proficiency adult bilinguals who currently use English and Spanish with equal frequency showed less evidence of cross–language activation and only in the spoken modality. Implications for theories of bilingual representation will be discussed.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P131
Autonomy in the development of the uvular rhotic in French-Portuguese bilingual children
Leticia Almeida; Rodrigo Pereira
“The literature on bilingual language development often reports cases of cross-linguistic interaction (CLI) of the two languages being acquired. CLI can manifest itself in 5 different ways: concerning rate of acquisition, delay or acceleration of the age of acquisition of a structure have been reported. Concerning phonetic realization, CLI may appear as transfer, merging or deflecting (Kehoe, 2015).
In this paper, we investigate possible CLI outputs in the development of the uvular rhotic in the bilingual acquisition of French and Portuguese. The uvular rhotic has several phonetic variants in both languages and different distributional properties: it can appear in clusters in French whereas only the tap can appear in clusters in Portuguese.
Ten French-Portuguese bilingual children, aged between 3;6 and 4;3, participated in our study. Their elicited productions were collected using two picture naming tasks from the Cross-Linguistic Child Phonology project, namely the European French and the European Portuguese versions, containing 14 rhotics in singletons and 18 in clusters in French; 11 rhotics in singletons and 44 in clusters in Portuguese.
We argue that the development of the rhotic shows nos signs of CLI: the uvular rhotic is acquired in French in singletons by all the children whereas only three children have mastered /r/ in singletons in Portuguese. In clusters, the development of the rhotic is also more advanced in French than in Portuguese, as expected according to the literature on L1 development. Additionally, the children exhibit several phonetic variants, the uvular voiced fricative being the most common in both languages, following adult output in each language. In clusters, we found that only one child systematically transfers the uvular French rhotic into her Portuguese productions. We thus argue that CLI does not systematically occur in the speech of bilingual children and that it can be child-specific.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P200
How Do Children Distribute? – Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
Yixuan Yan
“While sentences like (i) “three boys are holding two balloons” are interpreted with both collective reading (CR) and distributive reading (DR) in English, there are claims that sentences like (i) in Mandarin would have CR only (Lin 1998, a.o.). In this study we suggest an alternative proposal that both CR and DR are possible in Mandarin, but DR is eliminated by pragmatics in adults. Here we consider children’s interpretations of such sentences to provide evidence supporting the latter perspective.
Compared to adults’ preference for CR, English-speaking children are highly receptive to both CR and DR of (i) (Syrett & Musolino 2013); and such tolerance has been attributed to their grasp of overt number-morphology (Syrett & Musolino 2013) or less reliance on subject-verb agreement (Drozd et al. 2017). For Mandarin-speaking children, (a) their DR is predicted to be delayed because Mandarin lacks plural marking and subject-verb agreement; (b) they have not yet mastered pragmatics like adults, so we predicted that they are likely to accept both CR and DR.
Five- to six-year-old Mandarin children (N=20; 5;0–6;9, Mage=5;9) and adults (N=14) participated in a within-subject TVJT. Two types of contexts where CR and DR are true respectively match with three sentences like (i). The results show that while adults accepted CR for (i) significantly more than DR (p < .001), neither reading did children exhibit a significant preference for (no delay was found in DR), they exhibited a comparable tolerance like English-speaking children for both readings regarding (i).
Our hypothesis about the interpretations of (i) in Mandarin adults is confirmed by a follow-up adult Sentence-Rating Task. It shows that adults in fact accepted DR when the implicature is not available (N=34, p < .001). It thus can be concluded that children’s tolerance stems from their inability to deduce the CR-only implicature.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P200
How children wonder about facts
Ondřej Drobil; Klára Matiasovitsová; Anežka Kuzmičová; Anna Čermáková
“Stimulating children’s wonder at the real world is paramount to creating engaging literacy materials and pedagogies across school subjects. But how is wonder manifested in children’s language? Our paper will explore this while following the distinction between ‘efferent’ (learning about the world) vs. ‘aesthetic’ (affective engagement) stance. Furthermore, we will examine how wondering about facts relates to imagining (i.e., mentally representing alternative realities) as gleaned from specific linguistic markers (e.g., conditionals or conjunctions expressing causal relations).
Twenty Czech-speaking children (10 boys and 10 girls; aged 9-11 years) participated in the study. Children were interviewed about their interest in various non-fictional topics (e.g., animals, technology, space, fashion) and about the various activities (e.g., reading, viewing, talking, playing) through which they nurture their interests. The recordings were transcribed according to the standards used in spoken corpora of the Czech National Corpus. The recordings are transcribed and manually annotated for language of affective engagement and evaluative language (aesthetic stance), language of knowledge and thinking (efferent stance), imaginative language, as well as the associated use of conditionals and causal conjunctions.
We will use a clustering method to group individual turns based on the occurrence and co-occurrence of language of wonder and corresponding features (e.g., “what I might start to enjoy is probably gardening, because it’s also interesting to investigate just how the plants develop and differently just what they’re made of and stuff.”) and then explore variability among different children and interview phases quantitatively and qualitatively. The frequency of each category will be compared to the dataset of the SCHOLA corpus (the corpus of spoken language used during lessons in schools, 1M tokens).
Focusing on children’s language of wondering about facts, we are opening a virtually new research territory, one directly relevant to educational and other practice.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P200
Children’s visual attention when planning informative multimodal descriptions of spatial relations
Dilay Z. Karadöller; Aslı Özyürek; Ercenur Ünal
Children acquiring spoken languages often do not use informative expressions in their speech when describing spatial relations even around 8 years of age, especially for Left-Right. At these ages, they use under-informative descriptions in speech (e.g., Side) but use iconic gestures that disambiguate these descriptions together with their speech (Karadöller et al., 2022). Previous research with adults showed that visual attention to event components changes when describing missing information in speech via gestures (Ünal et al., 2022). Here, we aim to investigate whether children’s visual attention to spatial relations also differs when planning descriptions in speech vs. speech-plus-gesture in describing Left-Right relations between objects. Twenty monolingual Turkish speakers saw 84 displays with four pictures of the same two objects in various spatial configurations (e.g., Left-Right, lemon right to box; In-On, lemon on box). They described the target picture, indicated by an arrow, to a confederate. Participants’ eye movements were recorded prior to descriptions. Descriptions with specific spatial nouns (e.g., Left) were coded as informative in speech. Descriptions with general spatial nouns (e.g., Side) accompanied by spatial gestures that disambiguated the relative locations of the two objects were coded as informative with gesture. The remaining descriptions were under-informative (e.g., Side). A glmer model showed that (1) children had more fixations to target pictures when planning informative descriptions compared to under-informative descriptions (β=0.515, SE=0.131, p<0.001); (2) within informative descriptions, they had fixations to target pictures when planning descriptions that are informative with gesture compared to informative in speech (β=-0.827, SE=0.171, p<0.001). Summarizing, children allocate more visual attention to spatial relations when planning informative descriptions and when the disambiguating information is conveyed multimodally. These results extend previous literature by showing that visual attention changes in relation to both the informativeness of the message and the modality of the description in children.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P200
An Examination of Peer Influences on Narrative Development in Pre-Kindergarten Story-Sharing Circles
Kiren Khan; Liza Ashe; Abby Hultquist; Addy Mitchell; Esther Ballesteros; Olivia Freeman; Sophia Nappi; Kendall Dobie
There is growing evidence that peer relationships and interactions in a classroom context support children’s problem solving, creativity, as well as their language development. However, the specific mechanisms through which peer interactions support children’s language and narrative skill development in early childhood is less well understood. The present research examines how the nature and frequency of peer interactions during small-group, story-sharing circles implemented in prekindergarten classrooms influences children’s progress in their narrative skills. Findings from two separate studies will be presented to address the following empirical questions: (1) How does peer engagement, indexed by peer interactions and group laughter during story-sharing circles, relate to gains observed in narrative skills across 12 small group, story-sharing circles? (2) Are differential narrative and language gains observed in story-sharing circles encouraging friendship and peer interactions compared to those emphasizing active listening? In Study 1, 20 children (M = 62.35 months, SD = 4.57) participated in a total of 12 story-sharing circles over four weeks. Each circle group of about 5 children was led by a trained research assistant and was prompted to take turns sharing stories about negative emotional experiences. Results showed story circles with greater narrative gains had higher group laughter and engagement, with 2.5 times more task-relevant peer talk and twice as many supportive interactions. Study 2 involved 37 children (M = 59.65 months, SD = 4.77) assigned to either friendship or active-listening circles. A matched-control design ensured comparable age, gender composition, and baseline language and narrative skills across the two groups. Preliminary findings indicate that while both circle types made significant gains in story structure, differential gains were observed in linguistic complexity of stories for the two circles. Implications of this work on utilizing culturally-sensitive practices such as small-group, story sharing in supporting children’s narrative and language skills will be discussed.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P200
The effects of family, culture, and sex on linguistic development across 11 languages.
Paul Ibbotson; William Browne
Exploring language development from a multi-site cross-cultural perspective can reveal the factors that cause children to develop in similar ways and those that cause them to develop differently. Using a multilevel modelling approach, we explored three factors that are likely to explain a significant proportion of individual differences, and commonalities, in child language development: family environment, language environment and sex. Data consisted of naturalistic speech recordings of 80 mother-child pairs, totalling 2,282,353 utterances, divided across 11 different languages: Cantonese, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. Using Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) as a measure of language skill, we found that family environment, language environment and sex all significantly explain individual differences in children’s language development but do so in different ways: (1) After accounting for an overall linear growth, 24.3% of child MLU variance is due to language differences, 29.1% due to between child differences and 46.6% within children (2) individual differences in mothers’ MLU significantly predicted individual differences in their children’s MLU, particularly for younger ages (<3 years) (3) girls spoke with a higher MLU than boys of the same age and (4) across languages and families, children typically develop at the rate of 1 MLU per year, with an average MLU of 3 at 3-years-old. These findings are discussed with respect to the factors that cause children to follow different developmental paths and the implications for theories of language learning.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Social-Emotional Skills of Turkish-Speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorde
Nur Seda Saban-Dülger; Anja Starke
“Background: Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) show lower social-emotional skills than their typically developed (TD) peers, whereas children with challenges in language comprehension appear to be most significantly impaired. Evidence suggests that symptoms in different language domains result in different social-emotional impacts.
Aim/Objectives: This study aims to examine the relationship between social-emotional skills and language skills of Turkish-speaking children with DLD and TD language skills. It also investigates this relationship regarding receptive semantic and grammatical skills.
Methods: The study included children aged between 3-5 years with DLD (n=30) and TD (n=30). The children were grouped into age groups, with equal numbers of boys and girls in each age group. The language skills of the participants were assessed with the Test of Early Language Development 3rd Edition Turkish version. In contrast, the receptive morphosyntactic and semantic skills were examined with the subtests of Picture Vocabulary and Syntactic Understanding of the Test of Language Development Turkish Version. The maternal report on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was received to assess the social-emotional skills of the participants.
Results: Compared to the TD group, children with DLD exhibited lower receptive and expressive language skills and affected semantic and morphosyntactic comprehension skills. Similarly, the maternal reports on the SDQ indicated the impact of DLD on social-emotional development in the DLD group, although children with DLD in any age group did not reach the borderline scores. These results demonstrate the relationship between linguistic and social-emotional skills of Turkish-speaking preschoolers.
Conclusions: The correlation between linguistic and social-emotional skills has been observed in many studies; however, research on which linguistic domain plays the most influential role in this relationship has been limited. This study presents findings from Turkish-speaking preschoolers focusing on both general language skills and specific linguistic domains.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Sentence Repetition as a Diagnostic Tool for DLD: A Review and Meta-analysis
Leah Ward; Kamila Polisenska; Colin Bannard
“Background: Sentence repetition (SR) tasks are popular for use in language assessment as well as research. Performance on a SR task is viewed as a promising clinical marker of developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the ways these tasks have been designed and evaluated has varied considerably.
Purpose: We conducted a systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examining the accuracy of SR tasks in distinguishing between typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD. It explores variation in the way that SR tasks are administered and/or evaluated and examines whether variability in the reported ability of SR to detect DLD is related to these differences.
Method: Four databases were searched to identify studies which had used a SR task on groups of monolingual children with DLD and TD children. Searches produced 3,459 articles of which, after screening, 66 were included in the systematic review. A multilevel meta-analysis was then conducted using 46 of these studies. Multiple preregistered subgroup analyses were conducted in order to explore the sources of heterogeneity.
Results: The systematic review found a great deal of methodological variation, with studies spanning 19 languages, 39 SR tasks, and four main methods of production scoring (sentence binary, sub-sentence binary, target binary, and error scoring). There was also variation in study design, with different sampling (clinical and population sampling) and matching methods (age- and language-matching). The overall meta-analysis found that on average TD children outperformed children with DLD on the SR tasks by 2.08 SDs. Subgroup analyses found that effect size only varied as a function of matching method and language of task.
Conclusions: Our results indicate that SR tasks can distinguish children with DLD from both age- and language- matched samples of TD children. The usefulness of SR as a clinical marker appears robust to most kinds of task and study variation.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Production of Relative Clause in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder
Qi Qi; Ying Hao; Peng He; Dandan Liang
Relative clause (RC) is a complex syntactic structure that involves movement and recursion, so computations are needed to access nodes that are deeply embedded in the hierarchical structure (Computational Grammatical Complexity Account, CGC; van der Lely, 2005). A different framework is that these computations demand cognitive resources, in particular working memory (Dependency Locality Theory, DLT; Gibson, 2000). Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have difficulties with RC and show a subject RC advantage is consistently demonstrated in European languages (Adani et al., 2014). RC in Mandarin is head-final, which is different from RC in most languages that are head-initial. Studies in typically developing (TD) Mandarin-speaking children present a subject advantage (Hu et al., 2015). However, there is a lack of research on RC in Mandarin-speaking children with DLD. The study attempted to bridge the gap by examining a) whether Mandarin-speaking children with DLD demonstrate difficulties in the production of RC, b) which framework provides a better explanation for the learning asymmetry. We recruited 16 Mandarin-speaking children with DLD (ages 8;7-11;8), 16 TD children (8;7-11;9), and 16 younger TD (TDY) children (6;2-9;5). They completed a sentence elicitation task and working memory tasks. The results showed children with DLD achieved lower scores than TD and TDY children in the production of both subject and object clauses. While the DLD (p<0.001) and TDY (p<0.001) groups demonstrated a subject clause advantage, the TD group didn’t show such an asymmetry. Working memory didn’t have a main effect on the production of RC. The results indicated that children with DLD showed difficulties in the production of RC. The subject advantage in DLD and TDY groups appeared to support the CGC, not the DLT. The lack of asymmetry in TD children may relate to that the group of children were older than TD children in previous studies.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Tracking Verbs Through Gaze: Unlocking Word Learning Challenges in Preschoolers with DLD
PEIYU LAI; Feng-Ming Tsao
“Preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) face challenges in vocabulary acquisition. Previous research predominantly focused on “”nouns,”” leaving a gap in our understanding of how DLD children acquire “”verbs.”” This study bridges this gap by investigating verb learning difficulties in DLD children, specifically exploring nouns and verbs across word learning stages using explicit (pointing) and implicit (eye-tracking) methods.
The study involved 25 preschoolers aged 3-4 with DLD and a matched control group of typically developing (TD) toddlers (n=25). Novel words, including disyllabic nouns and monosyllabic verbs, were introduced to both groups—the word-learning tasks comprised training, word-referent selection, and retention. During training, children encountered novel words embedded in sentences and corresponding videos depicting nouns as animated objects and verbs as actions. In the word-referent selection, children listened to the new words and pointed to the corresponding referents (objects for nouns and actions for verbs). The retention phase assessed whether children retained their understanding of these new words after a 5-minute delay. Gaze patterns were recorded using an eye tracker during the two phases.
Results showed that learning novel verbs presented a substantial challenge for all children [p < .01], with DLD children displaying significantly lower accuracy than their TD peers [p < .001]. The eye-tracking analysis (target-looking ratio) during word selection revealed an interaction effect between word class and group [p < .001], indicating a reduction in target-directed gazes among DLD toddlers when encountering novel verbs. Additionally, verb-related gaze patterns significantly correlated with word-referent selection accuracy in the DLD group. Specifically, gaze patterns in word-referent selection correlated with the accuracy of the DLD group in both noun and verb conditions.
In conclusion, findings revealed that both DLD and TD groups experienced more difficulty learning verbs than nouns, but the verb-noun learning difference was more prominent in the DLD group.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Assessing the Acquisition of Singular Agreement With an Online Version of Sentence Repetition Tests
Mya Taylor; Javier Aguado-Orea
From very early, children must understand the distinction between 3s present tense (she plays) and 3p (they play). As it is well known, although children seem to acquire verb number agreement very early, they tend to drop -s in 3s. This pattern of errors has received different types of explanations, ranging from syntax-based causes (Belth et al., 2021; Wexler, 1998) to constructivist approaches (Pine et al., 2023). However, not many studies have managed to compare these positions using experimental designs. This distinction is important because children with developmental language disorder (DLD) typically find these types of morphological markers difficult (Bishop, Snowling, & Thompson et al., 2016). However, there is little research using language repetition tasks online with matched samples of DLD and TD children. The present study uses sentences matched for singular and plural agreement with three different lengths. 1) shorter subject and predicate (The girl jumps a wall); 2) long subjects (The boys with a ball jump a wall); 3) long predicates (The boys jump a wall with a rope). We also used verbs with different levels of frequency in colloquial English. Then, an online version of the sentence repetition test was created to study the potential deletion. The tool is particularly valid for testing 4-6-year-old children. It also shows that the training phase of the experiment is critical to achieving successful results. Omission errors (dropping -s in verbs) are not rare, particularly with longer subjects, followed by longer predicates, and finally shorter sentences. Also, the frequency of verbs plays an important role in the ability to process the items successfully. These results open the door for testing the proportion of errors committed by typically developing children and DLD-diagnosed ones matched for MLU, ideally across different language that typically add morphological complexity with plural agreement (e.g., adding -n in Spanish).
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P217
Sentence imitation and its relation to working memory and language skills in Czech children with DLD
Klára Matiasovitsová; Filip Smolík
Sentence imitation (SI) is a sensitive marker of developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the contributions of language skills, short-term phonological memory and working memory (especially central executive) to the performance are not completely understood. Our study examines the effects of these variables on the imitation of sentences with different complexity (demands on central executive functioning can increase in morphosyntactically complex sentences) in children with DLD and typically developing (TD) children.
Sixty-three children with DLD (6;5-9;6) were matched on gender and vocabulary with TD children (3;7-6;7). In addition to SI (containing relative clauses (RCs) and simple sentences) and receptive vocabulary, they completed tasks measuring their phonological memory and central executive (nonword repetition, listening span).
The effects of sentence type, DLD status and vocabulary / memory measures on the number of errors in sentence imitation were examined using cumulative link mixed model. Significant interaction between the effects of vocabulary and group (z = -2.00, p = .045) and vocabulary and construction (z = -1.97, p = .049) suggested that the relations between scores in SI and vocabulary are stronger in TD children and RCs. Models with nonword repetition / listening span as one of independent variables showed, that children with better nonword repetition and listening span made fewer errors in SI (z = -2.23, p = .026 and z = -3.07, p = .002, respectively), and revealed the significant effects of group (z = -4.15 and z = -6.45, respectively, both p < .001) and construction (z = 3.80 and z = 3.83, respectively, both p < .001).
The results indicate that sentence imitation is a good indicator of DLD, as vocabulary matched TD children were better in SI, and valid marker of language skills, as there was a relation between SI and vocabulary. SI also reflects the functioning of memory.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P300
Word frequency in Hebrew-speaking children with ID: implications for AAC core vocabulary.
Sigal Uziel; Gat Savaldi-Harussi
Children who do not attain functional vocal speech use Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems to meet their daily communication needs and to support their language growth. Selecting words for these AAC systems presents a complex and challenging task. Despite the limited number of words on a specific layout of the communication board, it must effectively reflect language structure and enable efficient communication (Beukelman & Light, 2020). A prevalent approach for selecting vocabulary for AAC systems relies on core vocabulary (200-400 words constituting about 80% of a person’s lexicon, irrespective of age or context). This paper presents findings from a pilot study proposing a wordlist for selecting core vocabulary for AAC systems used by Hebrew-speaking children with intellectual disabilities (ID). Our methodology involved analyzing natural language samples from five Hebrew-speaking children with ID using Levy’s clinical corpus on CHILDES. These children, aged 3.5 to 8.4 (Mean MLU = 5.28), were audio recorded in naturalistic interactions with an interviewer and family member. Using CHILDES tools, wordlists were extracted for each child, along with their usage frequencies. Percentages of the 20, 50, 100, and 200 most frequent words were calculated for individual children and for a composite list from all five children out of the total words (tokens) on each list. Words were categorized as function/content and coded for lexical category, followed by an analysis of their lexical distribution. Results reveal that the top 200 most frequent words constitute 69%-80% of each child’s lexicon and approximately 76% of the composite lexicon. Function words dominate the lexicon, while content words demonstrate lower frequency. These findings corroborate findings reported for Hebrew speaking children with typical development (Savaldi-Harussi & Uziel, 2023). The proposed wordlist will inform the creation of AAC intervention programs and promote early language development for Hebrew-speaking children with ID.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P300
The shape bias in Mandarin-exposed preschool autistic children: the role of shape recognition
Yi Su; Yi (Esther) Su; Letitia Naigles
“Background: The shape bias is an important word learning strategy in children’s language development in which the referent of a noun is extended to objects of similar shapes, rather than colors, textures, or sizes. Although numerous studies have observed atypical shape bias in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is no converging evidence regarding its underlying bases. Moreover, the research investigating the shape bias in children with ASD has been exclusively conducted in learners of Indo-European languages, yet it is less known whether the shape bias is a universal word learning mechanism across cultures and languages.
Methods: 37 two-year-old Mandarin-exposed typically developing (TD) children and a diverse group of 41 two-to-six-year-old children with ASD participated in a shape bias task and a shape recognition task. The intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPL) was employed to examine children’s shape bias performance. Children saw six triads of novel objects (target, shape-match, color-match) in both NoName and Name trials; a shape bias was indicated if they looked longer to the shape match during the Name than NoName trials. The shape recognition task consisted of nine three-dimensional objects composed of two to four geometric volumes, which represent nine basic level categories of objects.
Results: Mandarin-exposed TD children exhibited a shape bias while children with ASD did not show a shape bias despite a sizeable vocabulary (546 words). Further, a positive correlation was found between the shape recognition accuracy and the shape bias performance in the ASD group.
Conclusions: The shape bias performance of these children with ASD was positively associated with their ability to recognize object shapes. These findings provide cross-linguistic evidence for the shape bias and shed new light on the critical role of abstract representations of object shape in facilitating shape bias knowledge in preschool children with ASD.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P300
Professionals’ scaffolding in interaction with minimally verbal children with ASD
Roxane Perrin Hennebelle
“Previous studies have shown that minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are atypical interactional partners. They respond better to interactions with partners who support them, while adapting the stimuli to their tolerance threshold (Plumet, 2014). They need their interlocutors to be trained into their specific characteristics, which can be done with feedback on their practices. These practices correspond particularly to scaffolding moves (Bruner, 1983), which can relate to the achievement of the activity (task scaffolding) or to linguistic productions (linguistic scaffolding). However, few studies have described these language practices and their effectiveness.
In order to study the scaffolding practices and their adaptation to the children’s profiles, seven professionals and four preschool children with ASD in a French inclusive classroom were video-recorded during two years. We analysed 24 interactional sequences (5h30) during two activities, snacks (SK) and individual work-sessions (IWS). We coded task-scaffolding moves (guiding, regulation, and reactions to the children’s productions) and linguistic-scaffolding ones (elicitation, labelling, and recast). We assessed how children’s involvement (active vs passive) and reactions (adequate vs inadequate) influenced and were influenced by both types of scaffolding moves.
Results show that the professionals offered more frequent and diversified scaffolding during SK than during IWS. Concerning task scaffolding, the professionals relied more on physical guidance during IWS, while during SK they mostly broke down the task into simple components. Concerning linguistic scaffolding, they preferred labelling during IWS, while they favoured elicitations and recasts during SK. We observed significant inter-, and intra-individual variations depending on the children. These variations were more pronounced during IWS than during SK, which can be explained by the dialogical dynamics of these activities.
Discussion will address possible implementations of the study’s follow-up. Indeed, by analysing the professionals’ practices and offering them feedback, we can create conditions for reflexion on their own practices.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P300
Morphosyntactic skills in Arabic-speaking children with ASD: Error Patterns in the Sentence Repetiti
Muna Abd El- Razoq; Natalia Meir; Elinor Saiegh-Haddad
“Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in social interactions, communication, and repetitive behaviors (DSM–V, APA 2013). Although morphosyntactic deficit is not a core ASD trait, some children with ASD manifest significant impairment in this area (Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg ,2001; Schaeffer et al., 2023). Sentence repetition (SRep) tasks are reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic deficits across various languages and populations, including children with ASD (Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001; Meir & Novogrodsky, 2020). This study is one the first to evaluate morphosyntactic abilities of Palestinian-Arabic (PA) speaking children using a PA SRep task.
A total of 142 PA-speaking children, aged 5-11, participated in the study: 75 children with typical language development (TLD) and 67 children with ASD. The SRep task targeted morphosyntactic structures of varying complexity, including simple SVO sentences, biclausal sentences, wh-questions, and relative-clauses. Children’s accuracy scores were assessed across these structures, and error patterns encompassing morphosyntactic and pragmatic aspects were also analyzed.
Within the ASD group, two subgroups emerged: 43% showed intact language skills (ASD+NL) pairing up with TLD peers, while 57% showed morphosyntactic deficits (ASD+LI). Overall, all children made more morphosyntactic errors than pragmatic ones. Children with ASD+LI showed difficulties with producing complex morphosyntactic structures, such as relative-clauses and wh-object questions. Error analysis revealed that children with ASD+LI produced sentence fragments and simplified constructions when complex structures were targeted.
This study extends the cross-linguistic evidence of morphosyntactic heterogeneity in children with ASD to Arabic-speaking children. Moreover, it highlights the utility of SRep tasks in identifying additional morphosyntactic deficits in children with ASD. Error patterns suggest that poor morphosyntax, rather than pragmatics, challenges children`s performance on the SRep task. In conclusion, the results emphasize the need for tailored intervention plans targeting specific morphosyntactic deficits in some children with ASD.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P300
Theory of Mind in ASD and DLD
Osnat Segal; Eden Hadad; Eden Hadad
“Purpose: This study examined how subgroups of children with ASD and children with DLD perform on ToM tasks and language comprehension of mental terms. Methods: Eighty Hebrew-speaking children aged 5-to-6 were assessed. The participants were divided into four groups: DLD, ASD-Language Impairment (ASD-LI), ASD-Language Normal (ASD-LN), and typically developing peers (TD). The language status was verified using a Hebrew language test (Goralnik). All participants had a nonverbal IQ within average range (>75 IQ). ToM skills were evaluated using the Hebrew ToM Task Battery (ToMTB). Comprehension of the factive verb know and the non-factive verbs think, guess, and the adjective sure was assessed using 12 pairs of stimuli organized into three sets of four, with each set containing one of each possible pairwise contrast between the terms (e.g., know/guess, know/think, guess/think, and sure/guess).
Results:TD children scored the highest on the ToMTB, followed by ASD-LN, ASD-LI, and DLD groups, in descending order. One-way ANOVA for ToMTB scores revealed significant group differences. Pairwise comparisons indicated TD and ASD-LN outperformed ASD-LI and DLD, with no significant difference between ASD-LN and TD or between ASD-LI and DLD groups. For factive and non-factive terms (FNFT), TD children achieved the highest scores, followed by ASD-LN, DLD, and ASD-LI groups. One-way ANOVA revealed significant group differences. Pairwise comparisons showed that TD and ASD-LN outperformed ASD-LI, but the difference with the DLD group did not attain significance. No significant difference was observed between ASD-LN and TD groups. A significant correlation was found between the FNF and ToMTB scores (r = .50, p <.001), suggesting an association between the two tasks.
Conclusion: The present study highlights differences in ToM and comprehension of FNFT across subgroups of children with ASD and demonstrates similarities between children with ASD-LI and DLD. The present findings emphasize the linkage between language development and ToM abilities.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P301
Unraveling indicators of DLD in children with low exposure to their L2: A Longitudinal Approach
Jannika Boese; Anna-Lena Scherger
“Multilingualism is an increasingly relevant phenomenon in today’s society, with children often exposed to multiple languages from an early age. One of the pressing challenges in the field of child language studies is the assessment of language acquisition and developmental language disorders (DLD) among multilingual children (Lüke et al., 2020), as they often face unique linguistic environments (e.g., Unsworth et al., 2014).
The investigation presented in this paper is part of a greater research project on language support of multilingual preschool children with low exposure to German as their second language (L2), visiting specialized preschool programs in western Germany. Our study involves a longitudinal examination of initially 54 multilingual children (age: M=4;8, SD=0.41, gender: 57% female) at the transition from preschool to school. To capture the L2-skills longitudinally, we conducted assessments at three time points around transition to school within 10 months. L2 grammar, vocabulary, and phonological complexity skills of the children were assessed at all three measurement occasions.
Our initial findings show significant improvements in L2 receptive language over time, with improvements in receptive grammar remaining until the follow-up assessments, which took place after the children had transitioned to school (see Author et al., 2023). To identify early markers for DLD, L2-skills of children with the lowest results in previous assessments (25%) will be assessed again in October 2023 (fourth measurement occasion). Since the children now have regular contact with their L2 for more than 18 months, diagnostics are carried out to identify DLD using standardized test procedures for multilingual children.
These forthcoming results will provide a more comprehensive picture of language development trajectories and offer valuable guidance for the assessment of early L2-skills. Our study addresses a critical gap in the understanding of L2-assessment and the delamination of early DLD-markers and typical language development among multilingual children.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P301
L2 sentence comprehension and exposure effects in sequentially bilingual children with TD and DLD
Sini Smolander; Marja Laasonen; Pekka Lahti-Nuuttila; Eva Arkkila; Elin Thordardottir
“Background:
Differentiating typical language development and developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children is challenging. Since societal language is often the language shared between the child and the SLT, there is a need for a better understanding of the applicability of the available L2 language tests. Particularly, scarcely studied sentence comprehension and the effects of L2 exposure on performance in this domain could offer valuable information in differentiating DLD in bilingual children.
Aim: We investigated sentence comprehension and L2 exposure effects in sequentially bilingual typically developing children and bilingual children with DLD. We carried out group-level comparisons and examined the classification accuracy of two L2 sentence comprehension tests while considering several explanatory factors.
Methods: In total 100 6-year-old children were recruited from daycare centres and a hospital clinic. Two offline tests were used to investigate sentence-level comprehension in Finnish. We used multiple regression analysis to compare TD and DLD performance on a group level and took the effects of relative lifetime exposure to L2 into account. Covariate-specific receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was used to estimate the classification accuracy of the tests.
Results: Typically developing bilingual children performed significantly better compared to their peers with DLD in the sentence comprehension tests. The L2 exposure affected both groups similarly. The effect was significant but small. The sensitivity and specificity of the tests were good at their best, but the classification accuracy depended greatly on exposure.
Conclusions: Sentence comprehension performance in L2 is promising in assisting the differentiation of TD and DLD in children with several first-language backgrounds. It is important to add classification accuracy analysis to group comparisons when interpreting the utility of an assessment tool. In addition, explanatory factors, such as language exposure need to be considered.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P301
Investigating the Impact of Acquiring English on Executive Function Development in Early Childhood:
AYA KUTSUKI; Hideyuki Taura
“According to a substantial body of research, bilingual children exhibit distinct executive function (EF) skills compared to their monolingual peers. However, most of this research has focused on ‘native bilinguals’ or children who are consistently exposed to two languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of how acquiring a foreign language impacts early childhood cognitive development.
This study examined how differences in English proficiency and the duration of English learning experiences influence EF development, with a specific emphasis on performance in the Simon task. The study centered on preschoolers in the process of acquiring English. Linear mixed models were employed to analyze data from eighty Japanese-English bilingual kindergarten children (M age = 55.07 months, SD = 9.86, range = 36.13-70.63), all hailing from Japanese-speaking families and learning English at the same Japanese-English kindergarten in Singapore.
First, in general, growth in Japanese vocabulary had a negative impact on their English vocabulary but not vice versa, indicating that their Japanese proficiency remains stable as their mother tongue.
Furthermore, the impact of their bilingual kindergarten experience on Japanese language development varied depending on their level of English proficiency. Children with lower English vocabulary acquired more Japanese vocabulary through their kindergarten experience, while those with higher English vocabulary saw a reduction in their Japanese vocabulary through such exposure.
The results also revealed that English proficiency, regardless of age, played a crucial role in overall Simon task performance. The effects of the interaction between age and English proficiency differed between incongruent and congruent trials; inhibitory control was more closely linked to the combined effects of age and English proficiency than the ability to respond correctly.
Taken together, these findings suggest a connection between English proficiency and inhibitory control in English-learning preschoolers. We intend to conduct a more comprehensive analysis and discussion of the data.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P301
The potential of a gesture comprehension task to screen for DLD in bilingual children
Lotte Van den Eynde; Inge Zink; Maaike Vandermosten; Ellen Rombouts
“Correctly identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children is still a substantial challenge. Given the many misdiagnoses, there is an acute need for a screening test that is less influenced by the large variation in language experiences and that allows for early detection. In this regard, a gesture task shows great promise. Gesture development is strongly related to language development with studies indicating that gesture comprehension may predict language development. Notably, an iconic gesture comprehension task can differentiate between young, monolingual children with and without DLD. A gesture comprehension task is highly promising to detect DLD in bilingual children, as the task does not require verbal output and has potential to be used regardless of a child’s home or second language. In our study, we explore whether a gesture task can differentiate between bilingual children with and without DLD, and we examine its relationship with language proficiency measured by standardized language tests.
Analogous to Lüke and colleagues (2020), we developed an iconic gesture comprehension task consisting of 31 gestures. Children watch a gesture and select the corresponding image from a set of four images: a semantic-related distractor, a gesture-related distractor, an unrelated distractor, and the target item. The task will be completed by 72 bilingual children (typical development (TD)=36, DLD=36) between 3 and 9 years old. Standardized language tests are administered for validation purposes.
Preliminary findings from 53 participants (TD=22, DLD=31) reveal a significant group difference, with bilingual TD children outperforming bilingual children with DLD on the gesture task. Additionally, performance on the gesture task displays significant correlations with language tests assessing lexicon, morphosyntax, and home language development. Remarkably, the overall diagnostic accuracy of the gesture task reaches 85%. These results suggest that the gesture comprehension task holds promise as a screening instrument for DLD in bilingual children.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
The Impact of Language Context on Bilingual Children’s Memory for Newly Encountered Words
Yi Tong; Margarita Kaushanskaya; Haley Vlach
The context that forms the setting of a particular stimulus or event has been shown to affect memory retrieval. Tulving and Tomson (1973) proposed the encoding specificity principle, which posits that matching contexts between encoding and retrieval facilitates later recall of episodic memories. This principle was later extended to the linguistic context in the study of bilingual memory. To date, most studies on language-dependent memory have been conducted with adults and adolescents who already have years of experiences with language, and memory was assessed primarily using an immediate test. An important question remains whether young children who have limited prior knowledge and experiences with language demonstrate the same language dependency upon recall and whether such patterns can be observed after a delay. The current study addresses this research gap by investigating the effect of changing language contexts on bilingual children’s word learning from storybooks using both immediate and delayed tests. 54 Mandarin-English bilingual children (Mage = 66.7 months, SDage = 9.6 months, 32 males) were presented with a novel word learning task. Children read a storybook containing 6 novel words either in Mandarin or English. Their memory of these words was assessed either in the same or different language both immediately after reading and following a 10-minute delay. The results revealed that children who encountered a mismatch in language contexts between initial encoding and subsequent retrieval exhibited poorer memory performance after delay compared to those who learned and were tested in the same language. Our findings suggest that matching linguistic context might serve as an additional contextual cue that helps children retain information for longer periods of time, resulting in less forgetting. This study highlights the importance of considering the impact of instructional language on academic performance for learners of diverse linguistic backgrounds.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
On the developmental relationship between code-mixing and MLU in bilingual children
Jane Man-Yu Lai; Ziyin Mai; Stephen Matthews; Virginia Yip
“Is code-mixing beneficial, detrimental or neutral to language development in bilingual children? While language mixing is discouraged in some educational settings, translanguaging theory views it as pooling of resources from multiple languages and modalities in order to facilitate learning and communication (Li, 2018). Children’s code-mixing may be an index of grammatical competence (Yow et al., 2015), while mean length of utterance (MLU) has been found to be higher in mixed utterances than in monolingual utterances (Quick et al., 2018).
We examined data from 9 Cantonese-English bilingual children in the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, aged between 1;03 – 4;06 (Yip and Matthews, 2007). MLU was calculated for mixed and monolingual multi-word utterances in both Cantonese and English contexts. Analyzed using linear mixed effects models, MLU across all children was significantly predicted by utterance type (Monolingual/ Mixed; p<.001) and age (p<.001). There was also a significant two-way interaction between utterance type and age (p<.001).
Overall findings indicated that MLU was significantly higher in mixed than monolingual utterances in both Cantonese and English context. In terms of individual variation, 8 out of 9 bilingual children produced mixed utterances of significantly higher MLU than monolingual utterances in the Cantonese elicitation context; and 6 out of 9 children showed significantly higher MLU in mixed utterances in the English context, with this difference approaching significance or being numerically higher in the other 2 children. Developmentally, the older the child, the greater the MLU advantage in mixed over monolingual utterances.
From a developmental perspective, the increasingly higher MLU in mixed utterances as the children develop suggests that as children become more competent with both languages, they can creatively combine linguistic resources together to express complex content, consistent with Yow et al. (2015) and the translanguaging perspective.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
To learn words or aprender words: Consequences of codeswitching for children’s novel word learning
Emma Libersky; Caitlyn Slawny; Margarita Kaushanskaya
Bilingual children learn words in both single-language and codeswitched contexts. Prior work revealed both costs and benefits of codeswitched context on noun learning. However, verbs may be more difficult to learn than nouns, especially in codeswitched contexts and for children with weaker language skills. In two experiments, we examined effects of codeswitching on Spanish-English bilingual children’s verb and noun learning. In Experiment 1, 25 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-5years (13 girls) learned two sets of English-like novel verbs: one in an English-only and one in a codeswitched condition. Children watched videos and heard sentences using the target verb. Sentences in the codeswitched condition naturalistically alternated between languages. Children learned words in six teach-test cycles measuring initial mapping (cycle one) and catch up (cycles two-six). We regressed item-level accuracy on condition, language ability, and their interaction. A marginal effect of condition and a significant condition-by-language ability interaction for cycle one indicated better immediate learning in the codeswitched condition, but only for children with higher levels of language ability. Cycle two-six analyses indicated a significant, positive effect of language ability only. In Experiment 2 (ongoing) 16 bilingual children ages 4-5years (7 girls) are learning English-like nouns referring to imaginary foods, tools, and animals in English-only and codeswitched conditions; otherwise, the methods are identical to Experiment 1. Preliminary analyses indicate above-chance learning in both conditions, and no significant effects of condition or language ability. Codeswitched context did not disadvantage learning in either experiment. In fact, contrary to our predictions, an initial advantage of codeswitched input for verb learning was observed, especially in children with higher language abilities. This contrasts with prior studies indicating a disadvantage of codeswitched (vs. single-language) context for word learning, perhaps reflecting more naturalistic and more extensive exposure to codeswitching in our study vs. prior studies.
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
Input Effects on Syntactic Development: The Case of Particle Placement
Arthur KAN; Ziyin Mai; Stephen Matthews; Virginia Yip
“This paper presents the results of a study of qualitative aspects of input and lexical
specificity effects on particle placement patterns in a dataset comprising longitudinal speech
data from monolingual English-speaking children (1;10-2;08), Cantonese-English bilingual
children (1;03-4:06), and child-directed speech from their respective input providers. To what
extent and how the adult’s usage of a syntactic pattern can influence the child’s production
has been well-studied in monolingual settings, but not in bilingual environments. The English
verb-particle construction (VPC) has two possible word orders: VPO (put down the book) and
VOP (put the book down), whereas the closest equivalent in Cantonese, the directional verb
construction (DVC), only allows the VPO order. Corpus-linguistic research has identified
distinctive collexemes that are either strongly associated with VPO (pick up the phone) and
VOP (get the book back). We hypothesize native adults’ usage of VPC ordering is contingent
upon such groupings of collexemes. The bilingual experience dilutes the absolute frequency
of encountering different distinctive collexemes, therefore, we predict the major area of cross-
linguistic influence to be in VPCs that are (i) infrequent and (ii) lexically-specific in its
occurrence with a particular order.
We extracted 3654 valid English VPCs from the bilingual and monolingual corpora. In
order to identify lexical effects, we only included the shared VPC lemma (23 types) resulting
in 2053 VPCs for the analysis. We first ran a regression and found that the bilingual group
used significantly more VPO orders than their monolingual peers and adults in both bilingual
and monolingual groups, indicating quantitative crosslinguistic influence. Next, we ran a
distinctive collexeme analysis and found that bilinguals experience stronger crosslinguistic
influence when the VPC lemma has a strong preference for VPO order in English (e.g. pick
up the phone).”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
Code-mixing as translanguaging: MLU in two trilingual Cantonese-Mandarin-English speaking children
Jane Man-Yu Lai; Ziyin Mai; Stephen Matthews; Virginia Yip
“Recent studies have advocated translanguaging as a pedagogical practice which encourages learners to use their entire linguistic repertoire to express meaning, with code-mixing viewed as facilitating learning (Li, 2018). While previous studies on bilingual children have found suggestive evidence for linguistic competence (Yow et al., 2015), higher MLU and complexity associated with mixed utterances (Quick et al., 2018), little is known about code-mixing in trilingual development.
We analyzed longitudinal data of two trilingual Cantonese-Mandarin-English speaking children in CHILDES, Winston(1;07-3;07) from the Child Heritage Chinese Corpus and Leo(1;06-2;11) from the Leo Corpus. MLU was computed for mixed and monolingual multi-word utterances in Cantonese, Mandarin and English contexts. A linear regression model was fitted for each child and language context subset, with MLU as the dependent measure and utterance type (Monolingual/ Mixed) and age as predictors.
The two trilingual children showed similar patterns. MLU was significantly higher in mixed than monolingual utterances in Winston’s Cantonese (p<.001) and Mandarin (p<.001); and numerically higher in Leo’s Cantonese and Mandarin. In the Cantonese context, the MLU of mixed utterances peaked at 6.1 (Winston) and 6.3 (Leo) versus 5.7 (Winston) and 4.9 (Leo) for monolingual utterances. Similarly in the Mandarin context, the MLU of mixed utterances peaked at 6.2 (Winston) and 6 (Leo) versus 5.6 (Winston) and 4.4 (Leo) for monolingual utterances. However, both children seldom produced mixed utterances in the English context, and MLU was comparable between both utterance types.
Qualitatively, mixed utterances were attested containing elements from three languages. Taken together, these novel findings suggest that trilingual children are pooling their linguistic resources together strategically and combine elements of three languages to express more complex content than they can express in one language alone, and are thus productively ‘translanguaging’, at least in Cantonese and Mandarin. These contribute to a positive view of code-mixing.”
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07/17/2024 from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM , room P429
Reading in two languages improves bilinguals’ ability to integrate information from different texts
Jacopo Torregrossa
Studies on bilinguals’ processing of written texts typically compare bilinguals with monolinguals and involve only one language. However, bilinguals’ discourse-models result from dynamic interactions between all languages of their repertoires (DeHouwer 2022, Rothman et al. 2022, Torregrossa et al. 2022). Our study only investigated bilinguals, but in one-language vs. two-language MODE, allowing for within-participant comparisons: We studied effects of two-language MODE on bilinguals’ abilities to comprehend texts, draw intertextual inferences, and create discourse representations. This was inspired by didactic activities, where children integrate information from texts in different languages (Celic/Seltzer 2011, Ascenzi-Moreno/Espinosa 2018). Thirty-nine Italian-German 4th-graders of a bilingual school in Germany played a board-game: the monkey Cheeky solved problems in 8 map-locations using superpowers. At each location, children found information about 3 superfruits/superpowers (Text_A) and a story describing Cheeky’s problem (Text_B). Both texts contained indefinite objects (Text_A: eating Meraca lets someone bend metal pieces very easily; Text_B: The monkey is now stuck in a fence). Texts appeared in one-language (Italian or German) or in two-language MODE (Italian-German/German-Italian). Children answered four questions:
(Q1-Q2) COMPREHENSION: Where was Cheeky at the beginning of the story?/Why does Cheeky have a problem?
(Q3) INFERENCE based on Text_A AND Text_B: Which fruit should Cheeky eat?
(Q4) TEXT INTEGRATION: What can Cheeky do after eating the fruit?
For (Q4), children received points for referring to both texts(e.g., Cheeky can bend metal [Text_A] and get out [Text_B]), or using definite/specific referring expressions (e.g., Cheeky can get out of THE fence)
A logistic mixed regression model showed no significant MODE-effect on COMPREHENSION and INFERENCE, but a significant MODE-effect on TEXT INTEGRATION. In two-language mode, children produced more elaborate and information-rich responses integrating both texts, suggesting that reading in two-language mode allows them to build more coherent discourse representations. The results support the use of bilingual reading-activities in schools.
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P217
VOT production by bilingual and functional monolingual children in a bilingual community
Robert Mayr; Simona Montanari; Jeremy Steffman; Ilda Umana; Lauren Sanchez
Previous research has examined voice onset time (VOT) production in monolingual and bilingual children (Fabiano-Smith & Bunta, 2012; Muru & Lee, 2017). However, these studies did not include “functional monolinguals” who live in the same community as bilinguals and have regular exposure to the other language despite not actively using it. Moreover, little is known about cross-linguistic differentiation in bilingual preschoolers’ speech productions. To address these gaps, the present study assessed English VOT patterns in word-initial bilabial and coronal stops produced by Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers (n=29; mean age=50.0 months, SD=9.9) and age-matched functional English monolinguals (n=28; mean age=49.4 months, SD=7.8). To examine cross-linguistic differentiation, we also assessed the bilingual children’s VOT productions in word-initial /b-p/ and /d-t/ in Spanish. Data collection involved elicitation of single-word speech samples in each language based on pictorial representations of familiar words. This yielded 627 English tokens and 327 Spanish tokens. The digitized materials were analysed acoustically using PRAAT software (Version 6.1.09, Boersma & Weenink, 2020). The results show that the bilinguals and functional monolinguals differentiated English voiced and voiceless stops in the same way despite the latter using English significantly more often and having a more extensive lexicon, as assessed using the PPVT-5 (Dunn, 2018). At the same time, the bilinguals exhibited cross-linguistic interaction patterns, with differentiation of /p/ and /t/ across Spanish and English, but merged categories for /b/ and /d/. Finally, the results indicate that the functional monolinguals’ English VOT productions were also influenced by exposure to Spanish since they exhibited unusually high prevoicing patterns for /b/ and /d/, although these categories are typically produced with short-lag VOT patterns in English. This suggests that in a bilingual community mere exposure to a minority language may affect speech patterns in the majority language, even if the minority language is not actively used.
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P217
Developmental Relation of Gesture and Language in One-Year-Olds
Kawai Chui; Huei-Mei Liu; Feng-Ming Tsao
Gesture emerges earlier than language and indexes children’s communicative, symbolic, and language development. Cross-modal association has been studied in diverse interactional and experimental contexts; however, the relation of gesture and receptive-expressive language in infancy remains obscure. The present study investigates whether gestural abilities are correlated with language abilities, and if so, in what manner. We observed gestural and linguistic performances in 23 one-year-olds who interacted with their mothers while engaging in the same sets of toys and pictures for about 40 minutes in the lab. Infants’ language data were derived from the standardized Chinese (Taiwan) version of CDI. We analyzed 823 communicative gestures spontaneously produced by infants – declarative gestures, imperative gestures, iconic gestures, showing, and giving. Language measures were vocabulary production, vocabulary comprehension, and comprehension of daily expressions. Using Pearson Correlation analysis, we found overall correlations between infants’ gestures and language performances (rs=.606 – .666, ps<.01). For gesture type, the rarity of iconic gestures (1.7% of the total) did not yield correlations with language, and giving someone an object (19.4%) was only relevant to vocabulary production (r=.515, p<.05). In contrast, deictic gestures of pointing (65.1%) and showing (13.8%) consistently maintain significant associations with language performances (rs=.430 -.776, ps<.05). Declarative index-finger pointing is much more prevalent than palm pointing (193 vs 50) in communicating a state of interest. It is correlated with vocabulary comprehension (r=.618, p<.01) more strongly than forefinger pointing for demand and request (r=.430, p<.05) or showing someone an object (r=.500, p<.05). The particular close relation between declarative gestures and language likely rests upon the primary referential-communicative function of making known infant’s own concern toward a referent and sharing self-interest with others. These results constitute an important basis upon which to determine gestural influence on language development as children grow.
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P217
From speech biomechanics to phonology: children use intrinsic vowel pitch for contrast enhancement
Jérémy Genette; Steven Gillis; Jo Verhoeven
“This study investigates whether Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (IF0) is present in children’s very early speech or if it is progressively acquired. IF0 refers to the (almost) universally observed phenomenon in adult speech that high vowels exhibit a higher F0 than low vowels. Two hypotheses have been formulated to explain IF0: a biomechanical account, which characterizes IF0 as an inevitable, physiologically driven process and an enhancement account, which attributes IF0 to speakers’ effort to render the distinctiveness of high and low vowels more salient by manipulating their F0.
Both hypotheses make different predictions about the emergence of IF0 in children’s speech. The biomechanical account posits that IF0 occurs in prelexical vocalizations, while the enhancement account suggests that IF0 arises during the lexical period. Current research on IF0 in early speech consists of two small-scale, inconclusive studies. The present study seeks to provide evidence of IF0 emergence in children’s early speech.
For this purpose, an acoustic investigation was conducted on a longitudinal corpus spanning 6 to 24 months, with monthly recordings from 30 children. This corpus contains more than 100,000 vowels from prelexical vocalizations and early words. These vowels were categorized as high or low vowels based on their spectral properties.
The results show that the F0 of high vowels is higher than that of their low counterparts as early as 6 months. This supports the idea that IF0 may be a biomechanical byproduct of vowel articulation. However, the findings also demonstrate that the size of IF0 increases from the first words onwards, suggesting that children resort to IF0 to enhance the perceptual contrast between high and low vowels from an early stage.
In conclusion, IF0 is probably biomechanical in origin but children learn to use it as an additional cue to enhance the contrast between high and low vowels.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P217
English Vowel and Stop Voicing Perception in Spanish-English Bilingual Preschoolers
Simona Montanari; Jeremy Steffman; Robert Mayr
Despite an abundance of research on speech perception in simultaneous bilingual infants, few studies have examined how young bilinguals perceive speech sounds in the preschool years, when important preliteracy skills whose emergence is dependent on speech perception abilities are being developed. This study examines English vowel (/i-ɪ/) and stop voicing (/b/-/p/) perception in Spanish/English bilingual preschoolers (N = 28, mean age = 4;7), comparing bilinguals’ perception patterns to those of monolingual peers (N = 32), and examining how child-internal (age) and external variables (input quantity and input diversity) predict English perceptual performance. Perception was assessed through a forced-choice minimal-pair identification task in which children heard synthesized audio stimuli that varied systematically along an /i-ɪ/ and a /p-b/ Voice Onset Time (VOT) continuum and were asked to match them with one of two pictures for each contrast. Children were familiarized with the stimuli before the experiment. We analyzed the data with Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analyses of categorization data, modeling responses as a function of continuum step, language background (monolingual or bilingual), age, exposure to English and Spanish (i.e., input quantity), and number of input providers in each language (i.e., input diversity). The results show no bilingual-monolingual differences for vowel perception, whereas bilingual children’s identification of the English consonant contrast was affected by their experience with Spanish stops, as evidenced by different patterns from matched English monolinguals. The results also show that while age solely predicted consonant perception, input quantity and diversity interacted together to predict how well children perceived the vowel contrast, with input diversity limiting perceptual performance in the context of less English exposure. We interpret these findings as suggesting that vowel perception may a) develop earlier, b) be less susceptible to cross-linguistic interaction, and c) be more affected by input characteristics than consonant perception.
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P217
The Prosody of Compound Nouns: Direct Comparison of Tunes Helps Children (and Adults)
Laura Wagner; Yu Jin Song; Shari Speer; Sarah White; Rebekah Stanhope; Rachael Frush Holt
“In English, lexical prosody can shift meanings. For example: Strong-Weak (SW) patterns lead to compound nouns, which may have idiosyncratic meanings (a GREENhouse is a place to grow plants) while Weak-Strong (WS) patterns lead to compositional modifier + noun interpretations (a greenHOUSE is a house colored green). Previous work has found that children generally favor the idiosyncratic compound noun interpretation for both stress patterns and struggle to use prosody to distinguish between the two until as old as 11 years.
In Study 1, we tested children (N = 61, 7 – 12 years) and adults (N = 23) by showing them two pictures (12 trials, e.g. a house that was green and a house for plants) and asking them which matched a target audio (SW or WS stress, counterbalanced across participants). Results largely replicated the previous literature: all children preferred to choose the compound noun picture, but only adults could use prosody at statistically significant levels to differentiate between the pictures.
In Study 2 we tested 75 parent-child dyads (age of children: 7 – 12 years) with the identical set of audios and pictures from the previous study, but now participants were presented on each trial with a single picture (e.g., a house that was green) and two auditory stimuli (SW and WS stress patterns) and asked which auditory stimulus described the picture. Children as young as 9 years could now successfully match the correct prosody to the target interpretation. We argue that the methodological change across experiments helped participants focus on prosody and encouraged direct comparison of the two stress patterns. These results suggest that prosodic contrasts are represented but can be used only in conditions where they are highlighted. Ongoing analyses are examining whether parental production of compounds (i.e., children’s input) might predict children’s prosodic comprehension." <br>---
07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
SASTA: Semi-Automatic Analysis of Spontaneous Language in Dutch
Martin Kroon; Jan Odijk; Frank Wijnen; Jelte van Boheemen
“The grammatical analysis of spontaneous language transcripts is an important instrument in research into language development and language disorders. For Dutch, two methods are available: TARSP for young children (1–4 years), inspired by LARSP for English, and STAP for 4–8 year-old children. Analysis of spontaneous language transcripts is done fully manually so far. In this presentation we will introduce and describe an open source application – SASTA – that can carry out a large part of this analysis automatically for TARSP and STAP.
SASTA accepts various text formats as input (including CHAT), and uses Alpino, an ‘off-the-shelf’ sentence parser for Dutch. SASTA recognizes a large variety of forms of deviant language use and analyzes these correctly. A significant feature of SASTA is a routine (AuChAnn – Automatic CHAT Annotation) that generates valid CHAT codes for informal ‘faithful’ transcriptions of words and phrases that are accompanied by an explanation by the transcriber. It generates as output a method-specific form and an annotated transcript. The output transcript can be corrected by a linguist, if needed, and re-uploaded into SASTA, after which SASTA generates an adapted (improved) method-specific form.
In experiments on corpora of typical and disordered child language, SASTA achieves an accuracy between 88 and 95% for both TARSP and STAP.
Though, SASTA cannot replace human analysis completely as yet. Further development is ongoing, in close collaboration with researchers in language development and clinical linguists. Nonetheless, using SASTA in its current state already leads to higher efficiency and better quality of analyses. Its use can thus contribute significantly to improving and accelerating research into language development.
In this talk, we will discuss SASTA’s under-the-hood architecture, its strengths and its current limitations. Additionally, we will zoom in on SASTA’s performance by showcasing its interface and the analysis it produces in a brief live demonstration.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
Prognostic Validity of Early Screening Instruments for Developmental Language Disorder in German
Eveline Pinstock; Satyam Schramm
“Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is associated with poor educational outcomes (Bleses et al., 2016) as well as an increased risk for psychological problems (Beitchman et al., 2001). Thus it is important to identify affected children early in order to support them. Some children with language delays at the age of two develop a DLD later. The other part of these children overcome the language deficits independently, which makes early identification of DLD challenging (Sachse & Suchodoletz, 2008).This study is the first to examine the prognostic validity of the German language screenings FRAKIS-K (Szagun et al., 2023) and SBE-2-KT (Suchodoletz, 2011) at the age of two years in relation to a clinically relevant DLD at the age of four years.
As part of a longitudinal study, parents filled out the German parent questionnaires FRAKIS-K and SBE-2-KT to assess their children’s early language abilities around their children’s second birthday. On their fourth birthday, the children (N=145) underwent standardized diagnostics of their language abilities (subtests ‘vocabulary’, ‘grammar’, and ‘sentence repetition’ from P-ITPA; Esser & Wyschkon, 2010; and ‘receptive language’ from IDS-P; Grob et al., 2013). Children who were at least 1.5 standard deviations below the mean of the normative samples in one of the subtests were classified as clinically abnormal.
Prognostic validity is determined using sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value as well as RIOC (relative improvement over chance). Additionally, ROC curves are created in order to obtain an ideal cut-off value of the vocabulary lists of the FRAKIS-K and SBE-2-KT for the classification of abnormal and normal.
The results of the study will be presented and the practical implications for the use of language screenings as part of the German pediatric medical check-up at the age of two years will be discussed.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
The use of pupillometry in bilingual assessment
Lisa Röbstek; Anna-Lena Scherger
“Bilingual children, like their monolingual peers, face a substantial risk of developmental language disorders (DLD). However, to date, there are no screening tools for bilinguals, hindering an early intervention and resulting in academic and social disadvantages (Thomas et al., 2019). Early assessment poses a great challenge as children are usually assessed according to their word production. However, bilingual children do not yet produce language in the second language when assessment is needed. Thus, there is a need for assessment tools focusing on implicit language knowledge rather than explicit language production.
As a non-invasive method, pupillometry can focus on implicit knowledge without requiring an explicit reaction. Especially the Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm has shown promising results. Studies employing VoE have examined children’s reactions to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences (Süss et al., 2018; Scherger et al., 2023) and simple versus complex sentences (Lum et al., 2017). They have consistently demonstrated that children exhibit pupil dilation in response to complex or unexpected stimuli. Further, children with DLD react differently than typically-developed children.
The present ongoing study pioneers the use of pupillometry in early DLD detection in bilinguals. For this purpose, grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli sentences (manipulating subject-verb agreement and verb-second position) are auditorily presented to 2- to 6-year old bilingual children (N = 45, mean age: 4.51, SD: 1.25; ≤ 12 months exposure to German). The pupillometry results of these children are then compared with their performance in non-word repetition, a recognised clinical marker for DLD in bilinguals (Schwob et al., 2021). After 12 months, the participants’ language production will be reassessed to retrospectively validate the pupillometric identification of children at risk for DLD. Preliminary findings reveal that n = 3 children do not display pupillometric sensitivity to grammatical violations, with one child additionally exhibiting poor performance in the non-word repetition task.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
Assessment of Mandarin Receptive Vocabulary in preschool children learning Mandarin
Hecheng Zhang; Jiangling Zhou; Ziyin Mai; Virginia Yip
“This study assessed Mandarin vocabulary in preschool children, utilizing an enhanced version of the Mandarin Receptive Vocabulary Test (MRVT) created by Chan, Lee, and Yip (2014). MRVT is the first standardized tool for Hong Kong children learning Mandarin as an additional language. It measures comprehension of nouns, verbs, and attributes from the early vocabulary inventory of Mandarin (Hao et al., 2008) through a word-picture matching task, with phonological, semantic, and unrelated distractors. We examined the reliability and validity of a short form of the test with improved visual stimuli among Cantonese-speaking child learners of Mandarin and investigated lexical development across different ages and exposure levels: children learning Mandarin at school in Hong Kong (Group 1, n = 78, age 4-6), and children receiving substantial Mandarin input at home in Hong Kong or Guangzhou (Group 2, n = 16, age 3). Based on previous projects, 65 low-accuracy items were selected from the original full test to create the short form of MRVT in this analysis. Input distribution and parent-rated proficiency in Mandarin were collected through parental questionnaires for both groups. For Group 2, additional measures of Mandarin proficiency were administered to evaluate the test validity (i.e., CDI, Tardif et al., 2008, and the Mandarin vocabulary subtest in WPPSI-IV, Weschler, 2013).
Results of Group 1 suggest the enhanced MRVT had high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alphas: 0.923) and correlated with parent-rated proficiency (r=.53, p<.001). Age and family input uniquely and positively contributed to MRVT scores (ps<.005). With increasing age and improved proficiency, children made more phonological errors (rs>.5, ps<.001) and fewer semantic errors (rs<-.2, ps<.05). For Group 2, MRVT scores highly correlated with CDI scores (r=.80, p<.001) and WPPSI-IV vocabulary scores (r=.55, p<.05). Overall, this enhanced short version of MRVT shows promise as a reliable and valid measure of Mandarin receptive vocabulary knowledge.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
Does degree of partner’s extraversion affect children’s speech accommodation?
Yitian Hong; Si Chen; Bruce Xiao Wang
“During conversations, individuals adapt their speech in response to their partners, a phenomenon known as ‘speech accommodation’. Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) suggests that this adaptation is employed to manipulate social distance, and it’s influenced by the impression we have of our conversation partner. While there’s a growing body of research on adults, little is known about how children accommodate their speech in conversations. Does the impression of partners also affect children’s speech accommodations? This study aims to expand understanding of child speech accommodation by investigating the effect of perceived personality of the partner, particularly their extraversion degree.
Previous studies showed a correlation between extraversion and specific speech patterns, e.g., individuals with higher extraversion tended to imitate F1 more with their speech being louder and faster. It remains unknown whether children perceive this correlation, leading to changes in their production.
Natural conversations were collected from 28 pairs of Mandarin-speaking children aged 10 to 12. The children participated in a game where they collaboratively identified differences between their pictures using spoken language. Each difference was related to a keyword. After the game, they evaluated their partner’s extraversion using a five-point Likert scale. F1, F2 and f0 of the keywords were analyzed. The average values of other pairs were utilized as baselines. The study found a significant interaction between the difference from partner vs. difference from baseline and the partner’s extraversion score for f0 (χ2 = 25.231, Df = 2, p < 0.001***), with no effect on vowel formants. Post-hoc analysis showed significant decrease of f0 difference from partner along with the increase of score, indicating that children were more likely to converge their f0 when they thought their partner was more extravert. The contribution to the expansion of CAT for children and the exploration of individual differences will be discussed.”
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07/18/2024 from 11:30 AM to 01:30 PM , room P429
Validation of a new verb and sentence battery for children
Vânia de Aguiar; Kim Vos; Annet Kingma; Roel Jonkers; Aliene Reinders; Cheyenne Svaldi
Background. Children with language disorders (LD) show persistent language difficulties
affecting verb processing disproportionately. Inflection of verbs for tense is stated to be an
important diagnostic marker for the identification of LD. However, existing language assessment
batteries for Dutch are not designed to identify specific impairments in lexico-semantic and syntactic
processes underlying verb and sentence production and comprehension. The aim of this study is to
assess the construct validity, concurrent validity and diagnostic accuracy of each subtest of a new
verb battery designed to evaluate verb and sentence processing abilities in children aged 4 to 12.
Method. 90 typically developing children (M = 7.25, SD = 2.11) and 34 children with LD (M =
8.74, SD = 2.15) were included in this study. Children were evaluated with 4 new tests: action
naming, verb-picture matching, sentence completion, sentence-picture matching. These tests
consider word properties at single word level (frequency and concreteness) and morphosyntactic
processes at sentence level related to word order, finiteness, and coreference, both for
comprehension and production. Standard language measures were also administered to measure
concurrent validity for measuring lexico-semantic and syntactic skills.
Results and discussion. Children with LD score significantly lower on all tasks than TD
children. In single word tasks, children with LD significantly performed worse on low compared to
high concreteness items, denoting semantic difficulties. Children with LD made more mistakes than
TD children in most sentence types examined. Validity analyses showed generally strong construct
validity via correlations with age, variable concurrent validity, and acceptable to excellent reliability.
The first results are satisfactory in terms of validity and reliability.
Conclusion. The tasks may add to the current instruments to evaluate language impairments
in specific aspects of verb and sentence processing, enabling identification of the functional locus of
these language impairments and thus better intervention planning.
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P217
The Role of Early Language Experiences in The Transmission of Family Background Inequality.
Anna Brown; Sophie von Stumm
“Children from families with fewer socioeconomic resources face a higher risk of poor long-term developmental outcomes. A key pathway for transmitting this family background inequality could be children’s early life language experiences. Socioeconomic status (SES) is known to influence language environments, a ‘language gap’ becomes evident early in life between high SES and low SES children.
Our research sought to quantify the role of early life language experiences in mediating the connection between family background and developmental outcomes, which had been previously unknown. This study builds upon previous research in two main ways. Firstly, our sample was well-powered and SES-representative. We used data from E-Risk, a UK-based longitudinal cohort study of 1,116 families who have been followed up at regular intervals since age 5. Secondly, we used mediation analysis to quantify how much the early language environment mediates the association between SES and developmental outcomes, both concurrently and across development.
We quantified children’s early life language environments from naturalistic samples of their mother’s speech. A wide range of language markers were extracted representing both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity. Preliminary analyses suggest that markers of mothers’ language quality correlated with their SES indicators (education, occupation, and income) at small to medium effect sizes. Mothers’ quality of language also significantly predicted children’s language ability at ages 7 and 12, but these associations were more modest than expected based on previous studies. Our results highlight the importance of using well-powered and large-scale methods for accurate child development research. Further results will address which SES indicators are most predictive of the language environment and how predictive early language environments remain throughout education. Our study provides an evidence base for language interventions and defines the upper limit of effectiveness an intervention can have in reducing inequality.”
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P217
Role of vision in learning language-specificity in co-speech gesture and its lack in silent gesture
Seyda Ozcaliskan; Che Lucero; Susan Goldin-Meadow
Language-specific gestures emerge in speakers even if they have not seen others gesture: Adult speakers who are blind from birth gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures produced by sighted adults speaking the same language. Specifically, blind adult speakers of structurally different languages follow the patterns of their native language in their packaging and ordering of semantic elements in gesture, but only when the gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture) and not without it (silent gesture; Özçalışkan et al., 2016a, 2018). Here we ask whether the timely onset of language-specific patterns in co-speech gesture, and the lack of such patterns in silent gesture, is affected by the ability to see others gesture. We studied speech and gestures produced by 30 blind and 30 sighted children learning Turkish, equally divided into 3 age groups: 5-6, 7-8, 9-10 years. The children were asked to describe three-dimensional spatial event scenes (e.g., running out of a house) first with speech, and then without speech using only their hands. We focused on physical motion events, which, in blind adults, elicit cross-linguistic differences in speech and co-speech gesture, but cross-linguistic similarities in silent gesture. Our results showed an effect of language on gesture when it was accompanied by speech (co-speech gesture), but not when it was used without speech (silent gesture) across both blind and sighted learners. The co-speech gesture pattern was in place at the earliest ages we tested both the blind and sighted children. The silent gesture pattern appeared later for blind children than sighted children. Our findings highlight gesture as a robust and integral aspect of the language acquisition process at early ages and provide insight into when language does and does not have an effect on gesture, even in blind children who lack visual access to gesture.
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P217
Activities in toddler classrooms: A multilevel analysis of educator-child interactions.
Rochana Mroué; Caroline Masson; Christelle Maillart
Context: Children’s language environments are crucial for the development of early oral language skills (Hoff, 2006), which in turn support later school readiness skills and enables academic achievement (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). To date, there is limited evidence on the quality of interactions in toddler classrooms, and even fewer studies have investigated interactions across different activities (Guedes et al., 2020). However, different activities are likely to influence educators’ language practices and children’s opportunities for interaction (Degotardi et al., 2016; Cadima et al., 2022). Objectives: In this context, the current study explores the extent to which global interactions, fine-grained measures of children’s and educators’ talk, and specific talk strategies vary according to different activities. Method: Video recordings captured educator-child interactions on a single day in 40 French toddler classrooms, with an average age of 15-36 months. At the classroom level, trained observers coded global interactions during multiple observation cycles in different activities using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System – Toddler (CLASS-Toddler; La Paro et al., 2012). Additionally, 10 minutes of educator-child interactions in each activity were extracted and transcribed using the CLAN program (MacWhinney, 2000). At the individual level, fine-grained variables measurements (i.e., lexical diversity, mean length of utterance) were conducted using CLAN, and specific talk strategies (i.e., wh-questions, comments) were coded according to a specific coding scheme. Results: Our multilevel models and corpus analyses predict that some activities are more conducive to higher-quality interactions (i.e., book reading) than others (i.e., mealtime) at all levels of analysis. We also predict that different patterns of children’s and educators’ talk strategies are distinctly associated to fine-grained variables and global quality ratings. Practice or Policy: Professional development should include targeted training focused on improving the least effective interactions within certain activities and/or maximizing the effectiveness of interactions in others.
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P217
Complex language use in children with hearing loss
Sharon Klieve; Patricia Eadie; Lorraine Graham; Suze Leitão
“Language has long been recognised as a key area of challenge for children with hearing loss (CHL). By the very nature of their hearing loss, they encounter barriers and difficulties accessing spoken language thereby impacting the quantity and quality of their language experiences. While CHL are at risk for language difficulties across language domains, little research has focused their use of complex syntax. This research investigated complex syntax use in eighteen 8- to 10-year-old children diagnosed with a moderate to profound hearing loss who had been fitted with hearing aids or implants before 2 years of age. Each CHL was matched on age with a peer with typical hearing and language development.
Findings indicate that CHL and children with typical hearing (CTH) have similarities in their complex syntax use across both measures of general language and complex language. However, when fine-grained analyses are undertaken, there are differences and those differences are impactful. Results indicate that while CHL produce a similar range of complex syntax types, they exhibit less frequent use, less variety, and reduced accuracy across and within complex syntax types as compared to their typically hearing peers. CHL demonstrate a range of error types that suggest challenges across multiple language domains.
Another broad finding is that relying on standardised language assessments appears to overestimate the skills of CHL and mask ongoing vulnerabilities. CHL as a group may score in the average range but there are still significant differences and wide variability – item and error analysis is crucial for understanding of individual strengths and challenges. To build a complete description of the complex syntax of CHL, multiple exemplars and multiple opportunities in different contexts are needed. The novel assessment protocol has promise as a comprehensive battery that can provide a deeper analysis of complex syntax in individual CHL.”
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P429
Contrasting lexical biases in Mandarin speech: verb-biased caregivers, but noun-biased preschoolers
Yi Su; Yi Su
“This observational study aimed to depict the lexical bias of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by analyzing children’s speech and caregiver input during semi-structured parent-child interactions.
We collected naturalistic language samples from 37(16 girls) 3-6-year-old (Mage=57.9, SD=12.92) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and their caregivers, and expressive language-matched 37(21 girls) 18-36-month-old (Mage=25.5, SD=9.39) typically developing (TD) children and their caregivers. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging was addressed for analyzing participants’ speech, as measured by types, tokens, nouns/(verbs+nouns) ratio, and the ratio in total lexical production.
Results showed contrasting lexical biases in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers and caregivers. We observed overwhelming nouns in utterances of Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without ASD, while their caregivers’ speech consisted of more verbs than nouns in the dyadic interaction. Notably, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD demonstrated a more substantial noun bias than TD children, while more verb types and tokens were observed in TD children’s speech. Additionally, lexical bias in caregivers’ speech of children with and without ASD has no significant difference, as verb bias was observed in their input. Interestingly, caregivers of children with ASD produced fewer verb types than caregivers of TD children. Moreover, language production of Mandarin-speaking children with ASD significantly was correlated with their caregivers’ lexical types and tokens, while TD children’s lexical production was only influenced by their caregivers’ lexical types.
This study supports that early noun bias is a language-universal phenomenon but provides evidence that language-specific features play a minor role in early lexical development. Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without ASD show noun dominance even though their caregivers’ input is verb-biased. It has important implications for understanding Mandarin-speaking preschool children’s communication features, highlighting the need for targeted language interventions for children with ASD.”
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P429
‘Baby talk’ revisited
Alan Rumsey; Francesca Merlan; John Onga
In a study of English-learning infants, Ito et al (2018, Cognitive Science 42:1974-98) show that diminutives and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months were associated with future vocabulary growth. Their analysis doesn’t depend on any prior identification of the relevant forms as ‘baby talk’ (BT), but they do note that diminutives and reduplication (along with iconicity) are often attributed to BT in other studies. This raises interesting questions about how BT has been identified, and the extent to which it involves diminutives and/or reduplication. Most studies have followed Ferguson (American Anthropologist 66:103-114) in: 1) identifying BT based on what a given speech community regards as appropriate for talking to young children; 2) providing no systematic evidence for what are taken to be community norms in that respect; 3) providing little or no evidence of the extent to which forms identified as BT are used, either in adult speech or by children in adult-child interaction. Here we address those issues, and assess the cross-cultural applicability of Ito et al’s findings, based on our longitudinal study of children’s acquisition of Ku Waru, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea. Our data include a 1.3 million-word longitudinal corpus of Ku Waru parent-child interaction, interviews with 10 of the parents about BT, and transcript-searches for the words they identify as BT. We find: 1) considerable differences among parents in what they identify as BT; 2) big disparities among words identified as BT in frequency of use; 3) no diminutives among words identified as BT, and few involving reduplication. A bigger role is played in those identifications by phonological simplification and local understandings of children’s language learning, and how to facilitate it. In conclusion we argue for an approach that combines systematic study of such understandings with corpus-based analysis of BT usage.
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07/19/2024 from 08:30 AM to 10:30 AM , room P429
Early language Development in four South African languages: Noun & Verb Bias and Morphological Onset
Frenette Southwood; Michelle White; Nomfundo Buthelezi; Heather Brookes
Much has been written about the existence (or not) of a noun bias in early child language. In this study, we establish whether there is a noun or verb bias in each of four understudied South African language varieties, specifically two Bantu and two West Germanic languages. We also examine whether there is a relationship between the number of nouns children have in their expressive vocabulary and the onset of use of noun morphology (such as plural marking), and between the number of verbs in children’s expressive vocabulary and the onset of use of verb morphology (such as tense marking). Furthermore, we ask whether there are clearly identifiable ages for a spurt in productive vocabulary and a spurt in morphosyntactic development as identified for some other languages (see e.g., Kristoffersen et al., 2008). Previous research looking at this phenomenon has been conducted in the global North and has not included agglutinative languages with complex morphologies, such as many Bantu languages found in South Africa. Participants for this study are monolingual toddlers (aged 16 to 32 months) acquiring either Afrikaans, isiZulu, Sesotho, or South African English (n > 400). Data on vocabulary size and content, and on grammatical markers were collected using the relevant language versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. The novelty of this study lies in the large morphological and grammatical differences between the four languages, which allows a more generalizable conclusion. The results of this study may add to our limited knowledge on the manner in which the language of child speakers develops in lesser studied contexts and may inform the assessment and tracking of early language development for diagnostic and intervention purposes.
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07/19/2024 from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM , room P018
CHILD DISRUPTIVENESS MODERATES THE IMPACT OF PARENT SPEECH QUALITY ON CHILD LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Fabio Trecca; Riikka Svane; Erika Hoff; Dorthe Bleses; Brett Laursen
“High-quality parent-provided language input correlates with favorable child language development outcomes. When parents engage in interactions with their children, such as reminiscing about past events, they provides fertile ground for enriching their children’s language experiences. However, certain behavioral traits in children may affect their ability to turn a supportive linguistic and interactive environment into language gains. For example, recent findings show that child disruptive behavior can diminish the beneficial effects of shared book reading on language development.
This study investigates whether child disruptiveness (hyperactivity, conduct problems) in reminiscing conversations moderates the impact of rich parent speech on children’s language development over time. N = 178 Danish parents and their 4- 6-year-old children reminisced about shared events in two home visits two years apart. The conversations were videorecorded. Parent speech was coded for quantity (rate of utterances and word tokens), linguistic quality (rate of word types and labeling of objects/actions, MLU), and interactive quality (rate of directives, questions [yes-no, close-ended, open-ended], and repetitions/expansions of child utterances). Child speech was coded for rate of utterances and word types and tokens , and MLU. Child disruptiveness was parent-reported.
The results show that parent linguistic and interactive quality predicts improvements in child language measures for children with below-average hyperactivity, but not for those with above-average hyperactivity. Conversely, the effect of parent linguistic and interactive quality on child language growth is positive for children with above-average conduct problems, but not for those with below-average conduct problems.
These findings suggest that impulsiveness/inattentiveness—a known negative correlate of child language skills—may act as a resistance factor that hinders the child’s ability to transform positive environmental speech input into conversational skills. In contrast, conduct problems may serve as differential susceptibility factors, amplifying the positive effect of rich parent speech input. Both findings have important implications for intervention.”
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07/19/2024 from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM , room P018
Child-Directed speech facilitates semantic role identification in English
Eva Huber; Balthasar Bickel; Sabine Stoll
“Recent research has shown that child-directed speech (CDS) is structured in such a way to optimise the extraction of parts of speech (Mintz, 2003; Moran et al., 2018) and word meaning (You, Bickel, Daum, & Stoll, 2021). Here, we ask whether CDS also facilitates the acquisition process of understanding the semantic roles of a specific argument of a predicate, a crucial part of the acquisition of morphosyntax in general.
We test this question by simulating the learnability of semantic roles in English using neural language models. We train the BabyBERTa model (Huebner, Sulem, Fisher, & Roth, 2021) on a small and a large training dataset (1.5 M tokens and 7.5 M tokens, respectively) from CDS from two longitudinal corpora (Lieven, Salomo, & Tomasello, 2009; Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland, 2001) and adult-directed speech (ADS) from spoken conversations taken from the British National Corpus (BNC, Consortium et al., 2007), i.e. four models in total. We extract contextualised representations of arguments from the neural language models, and feed these to a single-layer neural network that is trained to classify the semantic roles (Agent vs. Patient) of arguments. We analyse whether semantic roles are classified more accurately with arguments from utterances in CDS as opposed to ADS.
Our results show that semantic roles can be classified with high accuracy with both CDS and ADS (estimated mean accuracy of CDS small: 0.93, CDS large: 0.95, ADS small: 0.89 and ADS large: 0.91). The classification accuracy is decisively higher with utterances from CDS than ADS with a posterior pairwise difference of nearly 1. This suggests that CDS is better suited than ADS for learning to detect the semantic roles of arguments, an important cornerstone for learning the morphosyntactic features of a language.”
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07/19/2024 from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM , room P018
The impact of parental communication style and frequency on Georgian child language acquisition
Tinatin Tchintcharauli; Nino Tsintsadze; Ana Menagarishvili; Sigal Uziel
Parental input plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. Studies have shown that infants who receive more responsive and interactive input from their parents tend to develop better language skills despite their spoken language and/or culture (Bruner, 1981; Tomasello, 1992a, 2000, 2005). The present study examines the effect of parental communication style and frequency of exchanges on the acquisition of Georgian child language. The study is based on an analysis of 24 hours of naturalistic speech samples of dyadic interactions between two monolingual Georgian-speaking children (a boy and a girl) and their primary caretakers. The dyads were video-recorded every month between ages 12 – 24 months (on average 4 hours per month). Sample files at intervals of 6 months were transcribed, coded and analyzed using CHILDES. Coding included inflectional morphology and interaction style (directive, re-directive and supportive). The analysis included frequency counts, MLU, MLT and correlations. We assumed that the frequency of communicative exchanges, number of words used during interaction and supportive interaction style positively correlate with children’s Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes (MLU-m) at 24 months of age. Our findings reveal that the children’s vocabulary constituted around 10% of their parents’ vocabulary. The number of words used by the parents during the interactions positively correlated with the MLU-m of the child (Spearman’s rho=0.903, p<0.001), the frequency of exchanges, however – does not. The interaction style changes with age from a directive to a more supportive style. However, due to the small number of participants, the correlation between interaction style and MLU-m was not confirmed. Future research in this area would shed more light on the role of the interaction style in language acquisition.
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07/19/2024 from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM , room P018
Parental Behaviors Supporting Child Language Development at Early Ages
Magda Rivero; Rosa Vilaseca; María José Cantero; Clara Valls-Vidal; David Leiva
“Characteristics of caregiver’s behavior when interacting with young children has been related to child language development (Dave et al., 2018; Hubbs-Tait et al., 2002; Newman et al., 2016; Rowe, 2012; Rowe & Snow, 2020; Schwab et al., 2018; Tamis-Lemonda et al., 2001). Our study contributes to the existing literature by providing data from Spanish families, on a range of parental behaviors referring to the various dimensions that have been associated with optimization of language development (affection and emotional warmth, responsiveness, encouragement and non-intrusiveness, and cognitive and linguistic support).
Our aim was to analyze the relation between parenting behaviors and child language development at early ages.
Participants were 90 children, 88 mothers and 76 fathers (who answered PICCOLO),
74 of them from the same families. Parental behaviors were assessed with the Spanish version of the Parenting Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes (PICCOLO) (Rivero et al., 2021; Roggman et al., 2013; Vilaseca et al., 2019a, b). Child language development was assessed with the Bayley-III scales. Mothers and fathers were asked to self-record, separately, a session lasting between 8 and 10 min playing with their child at home, in their usual way and with their own toys.
For the analysis, some sociodemographic variables were controlled. Bivariate analysis showed significant positive relations between mothers’ responsive, encouraging and teaching behaviors and a child’s language scores. Relations were found between fathers’ encouraging and teaching behaviors and a child’s language. Regression models indicate that maternal and paternal encouraging behaviors predicted 18% of the variability in the child’s receptive language, and maternal responsive and father’s teaching behaviors predicted 16% of the variability in the child’s expressive language and the total language scores. The study provides new data that support the relevance of positive parental behaviors to improve a child’s linguistic development.”
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07/19/2024 from 11:00 AM to 01:00 PM , room P429
Verb type, NP position and case marking in sentence comprehension in Spanish-speaking children
Anali Taboh; Carolina Gattei; Diego Shalom
“Speakers use different types of morphosyntactic and semantic cues to achieve comprehension. These cues have different weight in different languages. A relevant question is when and how language-specific differences arise during development. There is evidence that German-speaking and Hebrew-speaking children aged 3 to 6;8 assign thematic roles in sentence comprehension based primarily on noun phrase (NP) order and that German-speaking children correctly use case marking cues over NP order rather late. We aimed to evaluate the progression of strategies employed by Spanish-speaking children for the integration of morphological case marking, NP order, and verb type in sentence comprehension.
We designed a sentence comprehension task following the truth-value judgment paradigm and constructed semantically reversible sentences in subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) orders with two types of verbs which can be used in both orders: activity verbs, with canonical order SVO as is general in Spanish, and object-experiencer psychological verbs, whose Experiencer surfaces as an object and whose canonical order is OVS, e.g., “¡A Burro le gusta Cerdo!” (DonkeyDAT cl.DAT likes PigNOM). Participants were 162 typically-developing Spanish-speaking children aged 3 to 9 years.
Comprehension improved significantly with age and was significantly better when the NP order matched the canonical order of the verb type. Comprehension of sentences with activity verbs in their canonical order was significantly above chance from age three onwards, while in non-canonical order this only occurred at age nine. For sentences with psychological verbs in their canonical order, performance was significantly above chance level from age five, but in non-canonical order it was not better than chance in any age group, indicating that children still relied on NP order more than case marking. For verbs whose lexico-semantic structure is atypical in Spanish, the ability to integrate all relevant morphosyntactic and lexico-semantic information might be developed later.”
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