Concurrent and longitudinal associations of developmental language disorder with peer victimization in adolescence: evidence from a co-twin study.

BACKGROUND: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience higher levels of peer victimization than their peers. However, it is not known if such associations reflect genetic and environmental confounding. We used a co-twin control design to investigate the association of language difficulties (DLD and separately poor pragmatic language) with peer victimization and compare the developmental trajectories of peer victimization across adolescence for those with and without language difficulties. METHODS: Participants were 3,400 pairs of twins in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), a UK-based population birth cohort. Language abilities were assessed via online tests at age 11 and peer victimization was self-reported at ages 11, 14 and 16. Language difficulties were defined as language abilities at least -1.25 SD below the mean of the TEDS sample. We performed linear regressions and latent growth curve modeling at a population level and within monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twin pairs. RESULTS: At population level, youth with DLD experienced higher levels of peer victimization at ages 11 (ß = 0.27, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 0.20-0.35), 14 (ß = 0.15, 95% CI 0.03-0.27) and 16 (ß = 0.17, 95% CI 0.03-0.32) and a sharper decline in peer victimization between ages 11 and 16 compared to their peers without DLD. The associations between DLD and peer victimization were reduced in strength and not statistically significant in within-twin models. Moreover, there was no difference in the rate of change in peer victimization between twin pairs discordant for DLD. Results were similar for the association of poor pragmatic language with peer victimization. CONCLUSIONS: Associations between language difficulties (DLD and separately, poor pragmatic language) and peer victimization were confounded by genetic and shared environmental factors. Identifying specific factors underlying these associations is important for guiding future work to reduce peer victimization among adolescents with language difficulties.

Nap effects on preschool children's learning of letter-sound mappings.

This study explored whether a daytime nap aids children's acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, which is a fundamental component for learning to read. Thirty-two preschool children in Sydney, Australia (Mage  = 4 years;3 months) were taught letter-sound mappings in two sessions: one followed by a nap and the other by a wakeful period. Learning was assessed by explicit letter-sound mappings ("Which sound does this letter make?") and knowledge generalization tasks ("Here's Tav and Cav, which one is /kav/?"). Results from the knowledge generalization task showed better performance after a nap than after wake. However, no nap benefit was found for explicit letter-sound knowledge. This study provides initial evidence that naps could be beneficial for preschool children's learning of letter-sound mappings.

The effects of spacing and massing on children's orthographic learning.

Despite substantial evidence that spacing study opportunities over time improves the retention of learned verbal material compared with study trials that occur consecutively, the influence of temporal spacing on children's learning of written words has not been investigated. This experiment examined whether temporal spacing influenced Grade 3 and 4 children's (N = 37; mean age = 8 years 7 months) learning of novel written words during independent reading compared with massing. Children read 16 sentences containing a novel word under either a spaced (sentences appeared once in each of four blocks) or massed conditions (four consecutive trials). After a delay, orthographic learning was assessed using recognition (orthographic choice) and recall (spelling to dictation) measures. Words experienced in the spaced condition were better recognized than those in the massed condition, but there was no effect on recall. These findings suggest that temporal spacing influences the acquisition of new written word forms, extending the potential utility of the spacing principle to reading acquisition.

The nature and frequency of relative clauses in the language children hear and the language children read: A developmental cross-corpus analysis of English complex grammar.

As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at pre-schoolers) and two of text written for children - namely, picture books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading and children's own reading books. Relative clauses were more common in both types of book language. Within text, relative clause usage increased with intended age, and was more frequent in nonfiction than fiction. The types of relative clause structures in text co-occurred with specific lexical properties, such as noun animacy and pronoun use. Book language provides unique access to grammar not easily encountered in speech. This has implications for the distributional lexical-syntactic features and associated discourse functions that children experience and, from this, consequences for language development.

Boys Write About Boys: Androcentrism in Children's Reading Experience and Its Emergence in Children's Own Writing.

Gender bias exists in our language environment. We investigated personal name usage in two large corpora of language written for and by U.K. children aged 5-13. Study 1 found an overrepresentation of male names in children's books, largely attributable to male authors. In stories written by over 100,000 children, Study 2 found an overall male bias that interacted with age. Younger children wrote more about their own gender. With age, girls became more balanced yet boys continued to show a strong male bias. Our findings demonstrate a male-centered bias in both children's books and their own writing. We consider the power of written language to both shape and be shaped by cultural stereotypes via systematic biases in gender associations.

Tracking the evolution of orthographic expectancies over building visual experience.

Literate children can generate expectations about the spellings of newly learned words that they have not yet seen in print. These initial spelling expectations, or orthographic skeletons, have previously been observed at the first orthographic exposure to known spoken words. Here, we asked what happens to the orthographic skeleton over repeated visual exposures. Children in Grade 4 (N = 38) were taught the pronunciations and meanings of one set of 16 novel words, whereas another set were untrained. Spellings of half the items were predictable from their phonology (e.g., nesh), whereas the other half were less predictable (e.g., koyb). Trained and untrained items were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences, and eye movements were monitored as children silently read all items over three exposures. A larger effect of spelling predictability for orally trained items compared with untrained items was observed at the first and second orthographic exposures, consistent with the notion that oral vocabulary knowledge had facilitated the formation of spelling expectations. By the third orthographic exposure, this interaction was no longer significant, suggesting that visual experience had begun to update children's spelling expectations. Delayed follow-up testing revealed that when visual exposure was equated, oral training provided a strong persisting benefit to children's written word recognition. Findings suggest that visual exposure can alter children's developing orthographic representations and that this process can be captured dynamically as children read novel words over repeated visual exposures.

Mutualistic Coupling Between Vocabulary and Reasoning in Young Children: A Replication and Extension of the Study by Kievit et al. (2017).

Recent work suggests that the positive manifold of individual differences may arise, or be amplified, by a mechanism called mutualism. Kievit et al. (2017) showed that a latent change score implementation of the mutualism model outperformed alternative models, demonstrating positive reciprocal interactions between vocabulary and reasoning during development. Here, we replicated these findings in a cohort of children (N = 227, 6-8 years old) and expanded the findings in three directions. First, a third wave of data was included, and the findings were robust to alternative model specifications. Second, a simulation demonstrated that data sets of similar magnitude and distributional properties could have, in principle, favored alternative models with close to 100% power. Third, we found support for the hypothesis that mutualistic-coupling effects are stronger and self-feedback parameters weaker in younger children. Together, these findings replicated the work of Kievit et al. (2017) and further support the hypothesis that mutualism supports cognitive development.

Children reading spoken words: interactions between vocabulary and orthographic expectancy.

There is an established association between children's oral vocabulary and their word reading but its basis is not well understood. Here, we present evidence from eye movements for a novel mechanism underlying this association. Two groups of 18 Grade 4 children received oral vocabulary training on one set of 16 novel words (e.g., 'nesh', 'coib'), but no training on another set. The words were assigned spellings that were either predictable from phonology (e.g., nesh) or unpredictable (e.g., koyb). These were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences. Reading times were shorter for orally familiar than unfamiliar items, and for words with predictable than unpredictable spellings but, importantly, there was an interaction between the two: children demonstrated a larger benefit of oral familiarity for predictable than for unpredictable items. These findings indicate that children form initial orthographic expectations about spoken words before first seeing them in print. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/jvpJwpKMM3E.

Examining incidental word learning during reading in children: The role of context.

From mid-childhood onward, children learn hundreds of new words every year incidentally through reading. Yet little is known about this process and the circumstances in which vocabulary acquisition is maximized. We examined whether encountering novel words in semantically diverse, rather than semantically uniform, contexts led to better learning. Children aged 10 and 11years read sentences containing novel words while their eye movements were monitored. Results showed a reduction in reading times over exposure for all children, but especially for those with good reading comprehension. There was no difference in reading times or in offline post-test performance for words encountered in semantically diverse and uniform contexts, but diversity did interact with reading comprehension skill. Contextual informativeness also affected reading behavior. We conclude that children acquire word knowledge from incidental reading, that children with better comprehension skills are more efficient and competent learners, and that although varying the semantic diversity of the reading episodes did not improve learning per se in our laboratory manipulation of diversity, diversity does affect reading behavior in less direct ways.

Do infant vocabulary skills predict school-age language and literacy outcomes?

BACKGROUND: Strong associations between infant vocabulary and school-age language and literacy skills would have important practical and theoretical implications: Preschool assessment of vocabulary skills could be used to identify children at risk of reading and language difficulties, and vocabulary could be viewed as a cognitive foundation for reading. However, evidence to date suggests predictive ability from infant vocabulary to later language and literacy is low. This study provides an investigation into, and interpretation of, the magnitude of such infant to school-age relationships. METHODS: Three hundred British infants whose vocabularies were assessed by parent report in the 2nd year of life (between 16 and 24 months) were followed up on average 5 years later (ages ranged from 4 to 9 years), when their vocabulary, phonological and reading skills were measured. RESULTS: Structural equation modelling of age-regressed scores was used to assess the strength of longitudinal relationships. Infant vocabulary (a latent factor of receptive and expressive vocabulary) was a statistically significant predictor of later vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading accuracy and reading comprehension (accounting for between 4% and 18% of variance). Family risk for language or literacy difficulties explained additional variance in reading (approximately 10%) but not language outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Significant longitudinal relationships between preliteracy vocabulary knowledge and subsequent reading support the theory that vocabulary is a cognitive foundation of both reading accuracy and reading comprehension. Importantly however, the stability of vocabulary skills from infancy to later childhood is too low to be sufficiently predictive of language outcomes at an individual level - a finding that fits well with the observation that the majority of 'late talkers' resolve their early language difficulties. For reading outcomes, prediction of future difficulties is likely to be improved when considering family history of language/literacy difficulties alongside infant vocabulary levels.