Developmental changes in articulation rate and phonic groups during narration in French children aged four to eleven years.

This paper reports on an original study designed to investigate age-related change in the way French children produce speech during oral narrative, considering both prosodic parameters - speaking rate and duration of the prosodic speech unit - and linguistic structure. Eighty-five French children aged four to eleven years were asked to tell a story after they were shown an excerpt from an animated film. All their remarks were transcribed and coded using ELAN as an annotation tool. Each narrative was analyzed for duration, articulation rate, and linguistic components (i.e., number of phonic groups, syllables, words, clauses). All measures were found to increase with age, with the duration of the phonic group and its linguistic structure showing the stronger differences. Results contribute to providing reference data on speech production during childhood, and they suggest the existence of two distinct developmental patterns in narrative production.

Education, Age and Gender: Critical Factors in Determining Interventions for Child Brick Workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Working in factories fashioning bricks by hand seems the epitome of hazardous child labor. Yet, efforts to remove children from this work have shown little success; impoverished families balance the value of their children's contribution against the risks they see. Unfortunately, psychosocial impacts are often not visible, and are rarely taken into consideration when designing interventions. A comprehensive occupational health study of children working in brick factories included a module on psychosocial risks and impacts. This analysis reports on the Pakistan and Afghanistan portion of the study which was administered to 450 child brick workers and 486 controls, aged 11-17. Factorial ANOVAs confirmed that working in brick factories was the strongest predictor of respondent's psychosocial health. However, they also identified subgroups of children that escape this prediction. Older girls, for example, actually felt better when working, compared with staying at home. Schooling had positive associations, especially in younger boys and adolescent girls. In fact, the results of this study showed that those who are at greatest psychosocial risk were girls who do not go to school. These findings underscore the importance of assessing psychosocial impacts and tailoring policy and interventions to specific gender and age categories of young workers.

Child Labor and Psychosocial Wellbeing: Findings from Ethiopia.

For children who work, there has been little research into the intricate relationship between their home lives and their work lives and the implications that this relationship might hold for their psychosocial development and functioning. This cross-sectional study was conducted in the Amhara region, Ethiopia, between March and April 2020 on a sample of 1311 working children with the aim, in part, of exploring ways in which various dimensions of children's psychological wellbeing are influenced by their working conditions and their family contexts. In addition to collecting data on some personal traits, family relationships, home environments, and detailed occupational characteristics, we gathered information on psychosocial wellbeing using 22 items from the Instrument for the Psychosocial Assessment of Working Children (IPAC). Exploratory factor analysis enabled us to identify five factors characterizing the dimensions of psychosocial wellbeing: work-related self-esteem, work-related stress, workplace supervision, emotional and somatic wellbeing, and self-determination. Linear regressions of these factors were then conducted on social, occupational, and environmental variables. We found that all dimensions of psychosocial wellbeing were significantly associated with the children's working conditions. Of particular interest, work-related dimensions of wellbeing, such as stress, self-esteem, and supervision, were significantly associated with the characteristics of the home and family environment. These findings illustrate that work and working conditions must be considered jointly, along with family life and home environments, as factors in both environments affect working children's socioemotional development and wellbeing. They also strengthen the call for a systemic approach to protecting children involved in child labor, in which families are central to all discussions.