Search results for "language development"
showing 10 items of 130 documents
The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study
1997
The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language–thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experiential to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the children's capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-re…
Orthographic depth and its impact on universal predictors of reading: a cross-language investigation
2010
Alphabetic orthographies differ in the transparency of their letter-sound mappings, with English orthography being less transparent than other alphabetic scripts. The outlier status of English has led scientists to question the generality of findings based on English-language studies. We investigated the role of phonological awareness, memory, vocabulary, rapid naming, and nonverbal intelligence in reading performance across five languages lying at differing positions along a transparency continuum (Finnish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, and French). Results from a sample of 1,265 children in Grade 2 showed that phonological awareness was the main factor associated with reading performance…
Reading and Spelling Development Across Languages Varying in Orthographic Consistency: Do Their Paths Cross?
2020
We examined the cross‐lagged relations between reading and spelling in five alphabetic orthographies varying in consistency (English, French, Dutch, German, and Greek). Nine hundred and forty‐one children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and were tested on word and pseudoword reading fluency and on spelling to dictation. Results indicated that the relations across languages were unidirectional: Earlier reading predicted subsequent spelling. However, we also found significant differences between languages in the strength of the effects of earlier reading on subsequent spelling. These findings suggest that, once children master decoding, the observed differences between languages are not…
Accelerating early language development with multi-sensory training
2012
This paper reports the outcome of a multi-sensory intervention on infant language skills. A programme titled ‘Rhyming Game and Exercise Club’, which included kinaesthetic–tactile mother–child rhyming games performed in natural joint attention situations, was intended to accelerate Finnish six- to eight-month-old infants’ language development. The participants were 20 infants (10 training group children and 10 control children). Their cognitive skills and both receptive and expressive language skills (Bayley Scales III) were tested three times (pre-, post- and follow-up assessments). The groups differed significantly in receptive language skills at the baseline, in favour of the controls. Th…
Parental contribution to child’s early language and interest in books
1998
The relationships between parents’ age, education, literacy activities and shared reading with the child and children’s language skills and early interest in books were examined in a longitudinal study of 108 children. Parents reported on their children’s lexical and grammatical development by using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (the CDIs) at the ages of 14 and 24 months. The Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to the children in a laboratory setting at 24 months. Information on parental background variables was obtained through a questionnaire before the children’s birth. Book reading habits were inquired when the children were 2 years of age. Mother…
Trajectories of reading development: A follow-up from birth to school age of children with and without risk for dyslexia
2006
In order to understand why some children are vulnerable to difficulties in their language development and their acquisition of reading skill, the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia followed 200 Finnish children from birth to school age. Half of these children had a family history of reading problems and were considered at risk for dyslexia; the other half were not at risk. A novel analysis, mixture modeling, revealed four subgroups with differential developmental trajectories to early reading. The subgroups who showed either a “dysfluent trajectory” (n = 12; 11 at risk vs. 1 control) or a “declining trajectory” (n = 35; 24 vs. 11) contained more children with familial risk for dyslexi…
The play and language behavior of mothers with and without dyslexia and its association to their toddlers' language development.
2004
The play and language behavior of mothers with ( n = 49) and without ( n = 49) specific reading disabilities (RD) was investigated during play with their 14-month-old children. The contribution of maternal behavior to the language development of their children was examined. The children's receptive and expressive language skills were assessed longitudinally at 14, 18, and 30 months, using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the Reynell Developmental Language Scales. Children with and without familial risk for RD did not differ from each other in any play or language measures at these ages. No group differences were found for mothers' manifestations of nonsymbolic play a…
New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation.
2014
International audience; : There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the sensitivity to statistics results from other processes, whereby many potential chunks are considered as candidate words, then selected as a function of their relevance. These two classes of models have proven to be difficult to dissociate. We propose here a procedure, which lea…
Atypical perceptual narrowing in prematurely born infants is associated with compromised language acquisition at 2 years of age
2010
Abstract Background Early auditory experiences are a prerequisite for speech and language acquisition. In healthy children, phoneme discrimination abilities improve for native and degrade for unfamiliar, socially irrelevant phoneme contrasts between 6 and 12 months of age as the brain tunes itself to, and specializes in the native spoken language. This process is known as perceptual narrowing, and has been found to predict normal native language acquisition. Prematurely born infants are known to be at an elevated risk for later language problems, but it remains unclear whether these problems relate to early perceptual narrowing. To address this question, we investigated early neurophysiolog…
The development of phonological abilities and their relation to reading acquisition: case studies of six Finnish children.
1999
The relation between phonological abilities and reading acquisition and the interindividual variation in the development of different phonological manipulation skills were assessed for six 7-year-old Finnish nonreaders. Intensive time series data were collected by following the children for 13 months. Assessments were conducted every 4 weeks with five phonological manipulation tests. The results indicated gradual progress at the group level. However, analysis of the individual profiles indicated large interindividual variation in the rate of improvement and in the relation between different manipulation skills and reading acquisition.