Children's Language (children + language)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Children's Language and Communication Difficulties: Understanding, Identification and Intervention

JOURNAL OF APPLIED RESEARCH IN INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES, Issue 2 2001
Juliet Goldbart
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From tears to words: the development of language to express pain in young children with everyday minor illnesses and injuries

CHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2010
L. Franck
Abstract Background Little is known about the development of language to express pain in the young or how children and parents verbally communicate when young children have everyday minor illnesses and injuries. Methods UK parents of children between the ages of 1 and 6 were invited to complete an Internet survey on children's pain language during everyday situations of minor illness or injury. Results Of the 1716 parents completing the survey, 45% reported their child had at least one word to express pain by 17 months of age, increasing to 81% by 23 months of age. Children used different words based on their age and in the contexts of minor illnesses and injuries, with words for expressing pain related to illness emerging slightly later. Children's language was purposeful in describing causes of pain and requesting specific forms of assistance from parents even in the very youngest age groups. Parents' communicated with their children primarily to gain further information about the source and nature of pain and to direct children's behaviour. Conclusions Children rapidly develop an extensive vocabulary to describe pain between 12 and 30 months of age, with words for pain from injury emerging first and reflecting the development of normal speech acquisition. The differences in verbal expressions in the context of minor illnesses and injuries suggest that children make a cognitive distinction between the origins and sensory aspects of pain. These findings can help parents, childcare and healthcare professionals to appreciate the early communication capabilities of young children and to engage in more effective pain assessment and management for young children. [source]


Children's use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 6 2009
Evan Kidd
We report on a study investigating 3,5-year-old children's use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity. Children were told three short stories that contained two homonym senses; for example, bat (flying mammal) and bat (sports equipment). They were then asked to re-tell these stories to a second experimenter. The data were coded for the means that children used during attempts at disambiguation: speech, gesture, or a combination of the two. The results indicated that the 3-year-old children rarely disambiguated the two senses, mainly using deictic pointing gestures during attempts at disambiguation. In contrast, the 4-year-old children attempted to disambiguate the two senses more often, using a larger proportion of iconic gestures than the other children. The 5-year-old children used less iconic gestures than the 4-year-olds, but unlike the 3-year-olds, were able to disambiguate the senses through the verbal channel. The results highlight the value of gesture to the development of children's language and communication skills. [source]


Families, Not Parents, Differ: Development of Communication in Finnish Infants

INFANCY, Issue 2 2009
Maija Haapakoski
This longitudinal study on Finnish families was conducted to identify developmental differences in family-level communication among mothers, fathers, and their infants during the second half of the infant's first year, and associations with infants' later language and communicative skills. We examined coregulated communication of parent-infant dyads during 5-min laboratory play sessions at 7 and 11 months. Few differences in mutually regulated communicative exchanges emerged between maternal and paternal dyads, and few developmental changes were found across the whole sample. Families with different communication profiles were identified, and changes rather than stability characterized communicative development at the family level. The family-level differences at 7 months predicted variation in children's language and communicative skills at 14 months. [source]


Task-to-Task Vagal Regulation: Relations With Language and Play in 20-Month-Old Children

INFANCY, Issue 3 2000
Patricia E. Suess
In this article we report patterns of task-to-task vagal tone change across multiple language and play tasks as well as associations between these patterns of task-to-task vagal tone change and language and play performance in 20-month-old girls and boys. Although initially different in vagal tone suppression during solitary play, girls and boys exhibited similar group patterns of vagal reengagement during successive language and play tasks with their mothers and with an experimenter. In terms of individual differences, vagal suppression during solitary play and vagal reengagement during social interactive tasks predicted language and play performance. Gender differences emerged in patterns of predictive relations: Task-to-task vagal changes predicted primarily play performance in girls and language performance in boys. These findings expose the effects of social context on directional changes in task-to-task vagal tone and speak to the functional role of appropriate vagal regulation in young children's language and play performance. [source]


Self-references among children's first fifty words: Indications for an emerging sense of self in Dutch-speaking children

INFANT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2001
Matty van der Meulen
Abstract The present study investigated at what age self-references would turn up for the first time in young children's language and what kind of words these were. This was studied for a corpus of the first 50 words, produced by ten children, five boys and five girls, collected through parental reports. Self-references were defined as all words that referred in one way or another to the speakers themselves. They were not restricted to utterances containing pronominals of the first person singular or the child's first name. The appearance of self-references varied with the onset of speech. Children who started to speak early also produced self-referent words at an early age (between 12 and 16 months). Self-references could be satisfactorily classified into three lexical categories: nominals, action words and modifiers, containing words (a) labelling body parts, (b) verbalizing action plans and ongoing actions, and (c) expressing characteristics of outer appearance and actions, and physical sensations, respectively. This indicates that young children's sense of self is not restricted to an awareness of their own actions, but that a variety of experiences contribute to this. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


How neighborhoods matter for rural and urban children's language and cognitive development at kindergarten and Grade 4,

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
Jennifer E.V. Lloyd
The authors took a population-based approach to testing how commonly studied neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are associated with the language and cognitive outcomes of residentially stable rural and urban children tracked from kindergarten (ages 5,6) to Grade 4 (ages 9,10). Child-level kindergarten Early Development Instrument (EDI) data were probabilistically linked to scores on Grade 4's Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), 4 years later, and to socioeconomic data describing the children's residential neighborhoods. Multilevel analyses were performed for a study population of 5,022 children residing in 105 neighborhoods across British Columbia, Canada: 635 children in 20 rural neighborhoods and 4,825 children in 85 urban neighborhoods. Concentrated immigration consistently predicted better child outcomes. Moreover, the determinants of children's language and cognitive outcomes analyzed cross-sectionally differed from the determinants of outcomes analyzed longitudinally. Furthermore, there were notable differences in the extent of the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic conditions and rural and urban children's outcomes over time. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]


Long-term outcome of oral language and phonological awareness intervention with socially disadvantaged preschoolers: the impact on language and literacy

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 3 2010
Caroline Henning
Early intervention aims to prevent poor literacy outcomes associated with social disadvantage. This study examined whether the short-term positive effect of a preschool classroom-based oral language and phonological awareness (PA) programme was maintained and transferred to literacy 2 years later. The vocabulary knowledge, grammatical skill, auditory comprehension and reading comprehension of 54 6,7-year-old Australian children who attended school in a low-socioeconomic area were measured. Children's PA abilities were also assessed and are reported elsewhere. There were no significant differences between children who had received intervention in preschool and those who had not, with the entire cohort performing below the average range of the general population. The findings indicated that while generating short-term positive effects, intervention in preschool did not enhance socially disadvantaged children's language and literacy achievement in the long term. [source]


Storybook Reading and Parent Teaching: Links to Language and Literacy Development

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD & ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, Issue 92 2001
Monique S?n?chal
This chapter addresses the question of how home experiences are related to the development of children's language and literacy skills. [source]


Inhibiting children's memory of an interactive event: the effectiveness of a cover-up

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2002
Sara-Jayne Williams
Children are generally more susceptible than adults to suggestive interview techniques. Children's memories of an event can be altered and added to by presenting post-event information (PEI). What is not known is whether embedding silence about a particular scene within the PEI makes that scene less likely to be reported. Children aged 5,6 years made cakes with an agent ,Mrs Flour'. The following day they received PEI in which a target scene from the original event was omitted, resulting in children reporting the target scene significantly less often than did controls (control= 57% and omit=,23% correct responses). There was direct evidence from the children's language that the omission led to a detriment in memory for the original scene itself. Allowing children to draw during the interview did not reduce the effect. Implications are discussed in terms of child victims and witnesses particularly regarding child sexual abuse. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Fathers and Mothers at Play With Their 2- and 3-Year-Olds: Contributions to Language and Cognitive Development

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 6 2004
Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda
Father,child and mother,child engagements were examined longitudinally in relation to children's language and cognitive development at 24 and 36 months. The study involved a racially/ethnically diverse sample of low-income, resident fathers (and their partners) from the National Early Head Start evaluation study (n=290). Father,child and mother,child engagements were videotaped for 10 min at home during semistructured free play, and children's language and cognitive status were assessed at both ages. Fathers' and mothers' supportive parenting independently predicted children's outcomes after covarying significant demographic factors. Moreover, fathers' education and income were uniquely associated with child measures, and fathers' education consistently predicted the quality of mother,child engagements. Findings suggest direct and indirect effects of fathering on child development. [source]


The Relation of Preschool Child-Care Quality to Children's Cognitive and Social Developmental Trajectories through Second Grade

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2001
Ellen S. Peisner-Feinberg
The cognitive ad socioemotional development of 733 children was examined longitudinally from ages 4 to 8 years as a function of the quality of their preschool experiences in community child-care centers, after adjusting for family selection factors related to child-care quality and development. These results provide evidence that child-care quality has a modest long-term effect on children's patterns of cognitive and socioemotional development at least through kindergarten, and in some cases, through second grade. Differential effects on children's development were found for two aspects of child-care quality. Observed classroom practices were related to children's language and academic skills, whereas the closeness of the teacher , child relationship was related to both cognitive and social skills, with the strongest effects for the latter. Moderating influences of family characteristics were observed for some outcomes, indicating stronger positive effects of child-care quality for children from more at-risk backgrounds. These findings contribute further evidence of the long-term influences of the quality of child-care environments on children's cognitive and social skills through the elementary school years and are consistent with a bioecological model of development that considers the multiple environmental contexts that the child experiences. [source]


Household food security is associated with early childhood language development: results from a longitudinal study in rural Bangladesh

CHILD: CARE, HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2010
K. K. Saha
Abstract Background Although household food security (HHFS) has been linked to academic performance in school children, its association with early childhood development has received less attention, particularly in low-income countries. We investigated the association of HHFS with subsequent language development of children at 18 months of age in rural Bangladesh. Methods We followed 1439 infants born in 2002,2003 to the mothers in Maternal and Infant Nutrition Intervention in Matlab study, a large intervention trial conducted in rural Bangladesh. A HHFS scale was created from data collected from mothers during pregnancy. At 18 months, children's language (expression and comprehension) development was assessed using a Bengali adaptation of MacArthur's Communicative Development Inventory which was based on mothers' report of their children's ability to comprehend and express words in different categories. General linear regression models were used to examine the association between HHFS and language development at 18 months of age adjusting for potential confounders. Results Household food security was associated with language comprehension (B = 0.19, 95% CI = 0.09, 0.30, P < 0.001) and expression (B = 1.01, 95% CI = 1.00, 1.02, P < 0.01) at 18 months of age. Mean language comprehension and expression at 18 months of the children in higher quartiles of HHFS were higher (P < 0.05) than those of the children in lower quartiles. Conclusions Household food security is positively associated with subsequent language development of rural Bangladeshi children. Early language development has been reported to predict later child development. Therefore, strategies to ensure HHFS status in Bangladesh and similar settings should be considered for optimum child development. [source]


Parental views of surveillance for early speech and language difficulties

CHILDREN & SOCIETY, Issue 4 2004
Margaret Glogowska
Objective: To investigate parents' experiences of surveillance for early talking difficulties. Design: Qualitative study nested within a randomised controlled trial. Setting: Interviews with the parents of 20 children identified as having early difficulties. Results: Most parents were in favour of surveillance of children's language. Parents do not totally welcome surveillance, however, as it also potentially medicalises their children's early lives. The study also revealed that many of the parents felt stigmatised by their children's difficulties. Conclusions: Listening to parents' accounts can increase professionals' understanding of their responses to monitoring of their child's development and referral to specialist services. [source]