The Home Literacy Environment Is a Correlate, but Perhaps Not a Cause, of Variations in Children's Language and Literacy Development.

The home literacy environment is a well-established predictor of children's language and literacy development. We investigated whether formal, informal, and indirect measures of the home literacy environment predict children's reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. Data come from a longitudinal study of children at high risk of dyslexia (N = 251) followed from preschool years. Latent factors describing maternal language were significant predictors of storybook exposure but not of direct literacy instruction. Maternal language and phonological skills respectively predicted children's language and reading/spelling skills. However, after accounting for variations in maternal language, storybook exposure was not a significant predictor of children's outcomes. In contrast, direct literacy instruction remained a predictor of children's reading/spelling skills. We argue that the relationship between early informal home literacy activities and children's language and reading skills is largely accounted for by maternal skills and may reflect genetic influences.

Effects of impoverished environmental conditions on working memory performance.

This cross-cultural study investigates the impact of background experience on four verbal and visuo-spatial working memory (WM) tasks. A total of 84 children from low-income families were recruited from the following groups: (1) Portuguese immigrant children from Luxembourg impoverished in terms of language experience; (2) Brazilian children deprived in terms of scholastic background; (3) Portuguese children from Portugal with no disadvantage in either scholastic or language background. Children were matched on age, gender, fluid intelligence, and socioeconomic status and completed four simple and complex span tasks of WM and a vocabulary measure. Results indicate that, despite large differences in their backgrounds and language abilities, the groups exhibited comparable performance on the visuo-spatial tasks dot matrix and odd-one-out and on the verbal simple span task digit recall. Group differences emerged on the verbal complex span task counting recall with children from Luxembourg and Portugal outperforming children from disadvantaged schools in Brazil. The study suggests that whereas contributions of prior knowledge to digit span, dot matrix, and odd-one-out are likely to be minimal, background experience can affect performance on counting recall. Implications for testing WM capacity in children growing up in poverty are discussed.

Specific language impairment in language-minority children from low-income families.

BACKGROUND: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual children with SLI. Studying bilinguals with SLI is important, especially in the light of increasing evidence that bilingualism can bring advantages in certain domains of executive functioning. AIMS: To determine whether executive functioning represents an area of difficulty for bilingual language-minority children with SLI and, if so, which specific executive processes are affected. METHODS & PROCEDURES: This cross-cultural research was conducted with bilingual children from Luxembourg and monolingual children from Portugal who all had Portuguese as their first language. The data from 81 eight-year-olds from the following three groups were analysed: (1) 15 Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg with an SLI diagnosis; (2) 33 typically developing Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg; and (3) 33 typically developing Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Portugal. Groups were matched on first language, ethnicity, chronological age and socioeconomic status, and they did not differ in nonverbal intelligence. Children completed a battery of tests tapping: expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, verbal and visuospatial working memory, selective attention and interference suppression. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The bilingual SLI group performed equally well compared with their typically developing peers on measures of visuospatial working memory, but had lower scores than both control groups on tasks of verbal working memory. On measures of selective attention and interference suppression, typically developing children who were bilingual outperformed their monolingual counterparts. For selective attention, performance of the bilingual SLI group did not differ significantly from the controls. For interference suppression the bilingual SLI group performed significantly less well than typically developing bilinguals but not monolinguals. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: This research provides further support to the position that SLI is not a language-specific disorder. The study indicates that although bilingual children with SLI do not demonstrate the same advantages in selective attention and interference suppression as typically developing bilinguals, they do not lag behind typically developing monolinguals in these domains of executive functioning. This finding raises the possibility that bilingualism might represent a protective factor against some of the cognitive limitations that are associated with SLI in monolinguals.

Screening for the Identification of Oral Language Difficulties in Brazilian Preschoolers: A Validation Study.

Purpose This study aimed to develop and validate a screening questionnaire for the early identification of language difficulties in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschool children. Method The article is divided into two studies. In the first study, we reported the theoretical principles that guided the development of the Screening for Identification of Oral Language Difficulties by Preschool Teachers (SIOLD) and tested the validity of its structure. The psychometric properties of the SIOLD were tested using a sample of 754 children attending Year 1 of preschool. Thirty-two teachers coming from eight different schools completed individual questionnaires for all their students. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the validity of the SIOLD. In the second study, we investigated the accuracy of the questionnaire for identifying children with oral language difficulties using a different sample of 100 preschool children. Using receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves, we assessed the sensitivity and specificity of the SIOLD to identify children who showed impaired language performance in a short battery of tests. Results The SIOLD has been shown to be a valid and accurate questionnaire for assessing the form and content of oral language in preschool children. It showed good accuracy, with sensitivity ranging between .750 and .857 and specificity of .946 for the identification of language difficulties. Among the cases positively identified by the SIOLD as having language difficulties, 54.5% were true cases of language disorders, while 45.5% were false alarms. The combination of these findings shows that the SIOLD overpredicts positive cases but identifies most children with true language disorders and passes most children without language disorders, as required of a good screening test. Conclusions The questionnaire provides a useful tool for enabling Brazilian teachers to refer children with language difficulties to the speech-language services. The theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Executive functioning and reading achievement in school: a study of Brazilian children assessed by their teachers as "poor readers".

This study examined executive functioning and reading achievement in 106 6- to 8-year-old Brazilian children from a range of social backgrounds of whom approximately half lived below the poverty line. A particular focus was to explore the executive function profile of children whose classroom reading performance was judged below standard by their teachers and who were matched to controls on chronological age, sex, school type (private or public), domicile (Salvador/BA or São Paulo/SP) and socioeconomic status. Children completed a battery of 12 executive function tasks that were conceptual tapping cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibition and selective attention. Each executive function domain was assessed by several tasks. Principal component analysis extracted four factors that were labeled "Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility," "Interference Suppression," "Selective Attention," and "Response Inhibition." Individual differences in executive functioning components made differential contributions to early reading achievement. The Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility factor emerged as the best predictor of reading. Group comparisons on computed factor scores showed that struggling readers displayed limitations in Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility, but not in other executive function components, compared to more skilled readers. These results validate the account that working memory capacity provides a crucial building block for the development of early literacy skills and extends it to a population of early readers of Portuguese from Brazil. The study suggests that deficits in working memory/cognitive flexibility might represent one contributing factor to reading difficulties in early readers. This might have important implications for how educators might intervene with children at risk of academic under achievement.

Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural effects on verbal working memory and vocabulary: testing language-minority children with an immigrant background.

PURPOSE: In this study, the authors explored the impact of test language and cultural status on vocabulary and working memory performance in multilingual language-minority children. METHOD: Twenty 7-year-old Portuguese-speaking immigrant children living in Luxembourg completed several assessments of first (L1)- and second-language (L2) vocabulary (comprehension and production), executive-loaded working memory (counting recall and backward digit recall), and verbal short-term memory (digit recall and nonword repetition). Cross-linguistic task performance was compared within individuals. The language-minority children were also compared with multilingual language-majority children from Luxembourg and Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Brazil without an immigrant background matched on age, sex, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal reasoning. RESULTS: Results showed that (a) verbal working memory measures involving numerical memoranda were relatively independent of test language and cultural status; (b) language status had an impact on the repetition of high- but not on low-wordlike L2 nonwords; (c) large cross-linguistic and cross-cultural effects emerged for productive vocabulary; (d) cross-cultural effects were less pronounced for vocabulary comprehension with no differences between groups if only L1 words relevant to the home context were considered. CONCLUSION: The study indicates that linguistic and cognitive assessments for language-minority children require careful choice among measures to ensure valid results. Implications for testing culturally and linguistically diverse children are discussed.

Caracterização da utilização de gestos por crianças com transtorno autístico durante a narração de histórias / Autistic children’s use of gestures in narrative of stories

Algumas crianças com o Transtorno Autístico desenvolvem certas habilidades comunicativas ainda que apresentem alterações pragmáticas. Tendo em vista que no desenvolvimento normal da linguagem as intenções comunicativas surgem antes na expressão gestual do que na verbal, o presente estudo objetivou verificar se crianças com esse transtorno conseguem utilizar-se dos gestos para suprir fala ausente ou ineficiente. A partir da utilização de seqüências de figuras que representam histórias (Baron-Cohen e colaboradores, 1986), foram caracterizados os tipos de gestos e suas funções comunicativas durante o processo narrativo. As crianças com Transtorno Autístico utilizaram gestos ora para acompanhar, sem completar o discurso, ora para substituí-lo. Elas usaram mais gestos do tipo manual e predominaram as funções ilustradora, adaptadora e reguladora. As implicações destes achados para o conhecimento atual sobre a elaboração discursiva de crianças com Transtorno Autístico são discutidas.

Despite the pragmatic deficits, some children with Autistic Disorder can develop communicative abilities. Since communicative intentions emerge earlier in gesture than in verbal expression, the aim of this study was to verify the use of gestures to replace or complete the speech. The kinds and functions of gestures produced by children with Autistic Disorder in story narratives were characterized. Picture sequences of short stories (Baron-Cohen and collaborators, 1986) were used to elicit the speech. Children with Autistic Disorder used gestures to replace or illustrate speech, without completing them. They used mostly manual gestures with illustrative, adaptative and regulative functions. The implications of the findings to current knowledge of speech production by children with Autistic Disorder are discussed.