Discrepancy between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabulary and infants' behaviour in a preferential looking task

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1; 6 (Experiment 1a) or 1-3, 1;6 and 1;9 (Experiment 1b) and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CD1, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CD1 (Words & Gestures). Infants were shown pairs of images of familiar objects, either both name-known or both name-unknown according to their parent's responses on the CD1. At all ages, and on both name-known and name-unknown trials, preference for the target image increased significantly from baseline when infants heard the target's label. This discrepancy suggests that parental report underestimates infants' word knowledge.

Do children with Williams syndrome really have good vocabulary knowledge? Methods for comparing cognitive and linguistic abilities in developmental disorders

The comparison of cognitive and linguistic skills in individuals with developmental disorders is fraught with methodological and psychometric difficulties. In this paper, we illustrate some of these issues by comparing the receptive vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal reasoning abilities of 41 children with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder in which language abilities are often claimed to be relatively strong. Data from this group were compared with data from typically developing children, children with Down syndrome, and children with non-specific learning difficulties using a number of approaches including comparison of age-equivalent scores, matching, analysis of covariance, and regression-based standardization. Across these analyses children with Williams syndrome consistently demonstrated relatively good receptive vocabulary knowledge, although this effect appeared strongest in the oldest children.

Family literacy activities in the homes of successful young readers

This paper presents an account of the literacy activities engaged in by the parents of 29 children around the time that the children were about to start school at Key Stage 1. Fifteen of the children were reading fluently before they began school and the remaining fourteen were matched for age, sex, receptive vocabulary scores, preschool group attended and socio-economic family status, but not reading fluently. In order to ascertain that the fluent readers were not simply coming from homes where literacy activities were more in evidence, parents were asked to report on their own literacy activities. The data obtained indicated that there were no systematic differences in the activities of the two sets of parents. They also showed that there was a considerable amount of literacy activity evidence in the homes. It is argues that, whilst the home environment is highly instrumental in nurturing literacy development, it is not enough to account for precocious reading ability.

What happens to precocious readers’ performance by the age of 11 years?

This paper reports on the progress made by a group of fourteen 11-year-old children who had been originally identified as being precocious readers before they started primary school at the age of 5-years. The data enable comparisons to be made with the performance of the children when they were younger so that a six year longitudinal analysis can be made. The children who began school as precocious readers continued to make progress in reading accuracy, rate and comprehension, thereby maintaining their superior performance relative to a comparison group. However, their progress appeared to follow the same developmental trajectory as that of the comparison group. Measures of phonological awareness showed that there are long term, stable individual differences which correlated with all measures of reading. The children who were reading precociously early showed significantly higher levels of phonological awareness than the comparison children. In addition, they showed the same levels of performance on this task as a further group of high achieving young adults. A positive effect of being able to read at precociously early age was identified in the significantly higher levels of receptive vocabulary found amongst the these children. The analyses indicated that rises in receptive vocabulary resulted from reading performance rather than the other way round

Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really 'bad language learners’?

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).

Cognitive Therapy Abilities in People with Learning Disabilities

Background  There is a need to develop and adapt therapies for use with people with learning disabilities who have mental health problems. Aims  To examine the performance of people with learning disabilities on two cognitive therapy tasks (emotion recognition and discrimination among thoughts, feelings and behaviours). We hypothesized that cognitive therapy task performance would be significantly correlated with IQ and receptive vocabulary, and that providing a visual cue would improve performance. Method  Fifty-nine people with learning disabilities were assessed on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), the British Picture Vocabulary Scale-II (BPVS-II), a test of emotion recognition and a task requiring participants to discriminate among thoughts, feelings and behaviours. In the discrimination task, participants were randomly assigned to a visual cue condition or a no-cue condition. Results  There was considerable variability in performance. Emotion recognition was significantly associated with receptive vocabulary, and discriminating among thoughts, feelings and behaviours was significantly associated with vocabulary and IQ. There was no effect of the cue on the discrimination task. Conclusion  People with learning disabilities with higher IQs and good receptive vocabulary were more likely to be able to identify different emotions and to discriminate among thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This implies that they may more easily understand the cognitive model. Structured ways of simplifying the concepts used in cognitive therapy and methods of socialization and education in the cognitive model are required to aid participation of people with learning disabilities.

Encouraging use of subordination in children’s narratives: a classroom-based priming study

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children’s use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking five- year-olds heard 10 stories, one a day, that either contained a high proportion of subordinate clauses (subordination condition) or a high proportion of coordi- nate clauses (coordination condition). Post-intervention, there was a significant group difference in likelihood of subordinate use which persisted ten weeks after the priming. Neither expressive grammatical nor receptive vocabulary skills were positively correlated with the likelihood of subordinate use. These findings show that input manipulation can have a facilitative effect on the use of complex syntax over several weeks in a realistic communicative task.

Viewing the body modulates tactile receptive fields

Tactile discrimination performance depends on the receptive field (RF) size of somatosensory cortical (SI) neurons. Psychophysical masking effects can reveal the RF of an idealized "virtual" somatosensory neuron. Previous studies show that top-down factors strongly affect tactile discrimination performance. Here, we show that non-informative vision of the touched body part influences tactile discrimination by modulating tactile RFs. Ten subjects performed spatial discrimination between touch locations on the forearm. Performance was improved when subjects saw their forearm compared to viewing a neutral object in the same location. The extent of visual information was relevant, since restricted view of the forearm did not have this enhancing effect. Vibrotactile maskers were placed symmetrically on either side of the tactile target locations, at two different distances. Overall, masking significantly impaired discrimination performance, but the spatial gradient of masking depended on what subjects viewed. Viewing the body reduced the effect of distant maskers, but enhanced the effect of close maskers, as compared to viewing a neutral object. We propose that viewing the body improves functional touch by sharpening tactile RFs in an early somatosensory map. Top-down modulation of lateral inhibition could underlie these effects.

Infant vocabulary development assessed with a British communicative development inventory

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) were collected from 669 British children aged between 1;0 and 2;1. Comprehension and production scores in each age group are calculated. This provides norming data for the British infant population. The influence of socioeconomic group on vocabulary scores is considered and shown not to have a significant effect. The data from British infants is compared to data from American infants (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994). It is found that British infants have lower scores on both comprehension and production than American infants of the same age.

Watching the infant brain learn words: Effects of vocabulary size and experience

Previous investigations comparing auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to words whose meanings infants did or did not comprehend, found bilateral differences in brain activity to known versus unknown words in 13-month-old infants, in contrast with unilateral, left hemisphere, differences in activity in 20-month-old infants. We explore two alternative explanations for these findings. Changes in hemispheric specialization may result from a qualitative shift in the way infants process known words between 13 and 20 months. Alternatively, hemispheric specialization may arise from increased familiarity with the individual words tested. We contrasted these two explanations by measuring ERPs from 20-month-old infants with high and low production scores, for novel words they had just learned. A bilateral distribution of ERP differences was observed in both groups of infants, though the difference was larger in the left hemisphere for the high producers. These findings suggest that word familiarity is an important factor in determining the distribution of brain regions involved in word learning. An emerging left hemispheric specialization may reflect increased efficiency in the manner in which infants process familiar and novel words. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.