Mean Length of Utterance in Czech Toddlers: Validity Estimates and Comparison of Words, Morphemes, and Syllables.

PURPOSE: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. METHOD: One hundred nine children were recorded during free-play at 2;6 and 3;11 (years;months). We compared MLU in syllables, morphemes, and words (MLUw) in transcripts of different lengths (50, 75, 100, and all available utterances). For evaluating the validity of MLU, we also calculated Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) and number of different words (NDW) and used results of receptive vocabulary and grammar comprehension tests. RESULTS: The different MLU measures based on different sample lengths correlated closely with MLU in transcripts of all utterances (all rs > .87). We found mostly strong correlations between MLU, IPSyn, and NDW at both time points and weak or moderate correlations between MLU and grammar and vocabulary. Regression models showed the significant unique effect of MLUw at 2;6 for MLUw (ß = .29) and grammar (ß = .33) at 3;11 and vocabulary (ß = .27) at 3;7. CONCLUSION: MLUw based on all utterances was confirmed as a valid measure of early language skills in Czech, as it is stable in time and shows concurrent and predictive relations with other transcript-based and test-based measures. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25215203.

Noun imageability and the processing of sensory-based information.

The aim of this study was to test whether the availability of internal imagery elicited by words is related to ratings of word imageability. Participants are presented with target words and, after a delay allowing for processing of the word, answer questions regarding the size or weight of the word referents. Target words differ with respect to imageability. Results show faster responses to questions for high imageability words than for low imageability words. The type of question (size/weight) modulates reaction times suggesting a dominance of the visual domain over the physical-experience domain in concept representation. Results hold across two different languages (Czech/German). These findings provide further insights into the representations underlying word meaning and the role of word imageability in language acquisition and processing.

How to Build a Communicative Development Inventory: Insights From 43 Adaptations.

PURPOSE: This article reviews 43 adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs), a tool used for measuring children's communicative and language skills. The aim is to provide an overview of different approaches to develop local versions of the instrument (reflecting linguistic and cultural specifics) and to formulate recommendations and suggestions that expand the current guidelines of the MB-CDI Advisory Board. The article also discusses cross-linguistic differences in the structure of this tool, as well as the availability of sources for the language-specific MB-CDI adaptations. CONCLUSIONS: Strategies differ in the construction of the inventory contents and in the norming phase, as well as in documenting reliability and validity. The most frequent strategies in developing the item lists are translations of existing CDIs and pilot administrations; relatively recent strategies include consultations with child development experts. The norming approach varies in, for example, the number of participants and techniques of administrations. When establishing age-related norms, different methods of growth curve construction are used. We recommend methods that consider the complete data set and provide a code example. We suggest that the reliability of the tool should be documented not only as internal consistency but also using test-retest measures, ideally combined with interrater agreement. It is desirable that adaptations establish criterion validity against other measures of language development, such as structured tests, spontaneous language samples, or experimental methods. In summary, by critically reviewing the different adaptation strategies, the present review article provides guidance for teams that adapt the MB-CDI into new languages. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22661689.

Corpus-based age of word acquisition: Does it support the validity of adult age-of-acquisition ratings?

Age of acquisition (AoA) is presumed to reflect the age or relative order in which words are learned, but is often measured using adult ratings or adult-reported observations and might thus reflect more about the adult language than about the acquisition process. Objective AoA estimates are often limited to words whose referents can be shown in pictures. We created a corpus-derived AoA estimate based on first word occurrences in a longitudinal corpus of child English, and evaluated its reliability and validity against other measures of AoA. Then we used these different measures as concurrent predictors of adult lexical decision times. Our results showed adequate reliability and good relations with other AoA measures, especially with parent-reported AoA (r = 0.56). Corpus AoA did not predict unique variance in lexical decision times, while adult AoA ratings and parent-reported AoA did. We argue that this pattern is due to two factors. First, the adult AoA ratings and parent-reported AoA are confounded with adult memory, lexical processing and reading difficulty variables. Second, the adult AoA ratings are related to actual age of acquisition only for words acquired during later preschool and school age. Our analyses support the utility of corpus-derived AoA estimates as an objective measure of acquisition age, especially for early-acquired words.

Emergency cesarean section is a risk factor for depressive symptoms when breastfeeding is limited.

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies indicated associations between cesarean section (CS), breastfeeding, and depressive symptoms. There is, however, little research integrating these variables into one model to analyze their interrelations. The aim of this observational prospective longitudinal study is to examine whether the effect of CS on postpartum depressive symptoms is mediated by difficulties with breastfeeding. METHODS: The participants were recruited in 5 maternity hospitals during their prenatal medical check-ups. Breastfeeding status was self-reported by the mothers six weeks postpartum. Screening for depressive symptoms was performed at six weeks (N = 404) and nine months (N = 234) postpartum using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. Path analysis was used to model the relations between CS, breastfeeding, and depressive symptoms. RESULTS: No direct effects of CS on depressive symptoms at six weeks or nine months postpartum were found. CS was associated with a lower probability of exclusive breastfeeding, which was, in turn, associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms six weeks postpartum. The analysis stratified by type of CS revealed that the effect on breastfeeding only occurred with emergency, not planned, CS. The effect of CS on breastfeeding was noticeably stronger in women without versus with a history of depression. CONCLUSION: Emergency CS predicts breastfeeding difficulties, which are, in turn, associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms. Support should be provided to mothers with emergency CS and breastfeeding problems to reduce the risk of postpartum depressive symptoms in the early postpartum period.

Here come the nouns: Czech two-year-olds use verb number endings to predict sentence subjects.

Two-year-old children can use gender or number agreement to predict upcoming words in phrases or sentences. However, most findings showed prediction from freestanding grammatical words, such as articles or copulas. While this shows knowledge of agreement relations, it might be limited to a narrow set of grammatical words. We examined the possibility that children at this age can use grammatical number agreement independently of specific closed-class words, testing whether they predict nouns from bound morphemes on lexical verbs. If this were the case, the emerging grammatical knowledge is unlikely to be lexically specific. Our first experiment replicated existing findings using number-marked copula, while the second experiment marked number on endings of four different verbs. Two-year-old children watched pairs of pictures showing single or multiple items while listening to sentences whose sentence-final subject referred to one of the two pictures. The grammatical Czech sentences contained a copula (Experiment 1: where is/are in the picture car/s?) or one of four number-marked lexical verbs (Experiment 2: Here jump/s the frog/s in the picture). Children in both experiments anticipated the subject from the verb or copula form. Children thus used number agreement predictively in the complex Czech copula system and lexical verbs marked by endings. This suggests that children understand grammatical number independently of specific grammatical words and supports the view that early knowledge of grammar is not lexically specific.

Validity of the SDDS: A 40-item vocabulary screening tool for 18- to 42-month olds in Czech.

BACKGROUND: Children with early language delays are at increased risk of persistent language impairment. Early identification and intervention are desirable. Parent-report inventories are useful screening tools, but the screening context places limits at their length. Validity of parent-report screening tools in languages other than English has been rarely reported in detail. AIMS: The aim was to establish the concurrent validity of an existing 40-item parent-report vocabulary screening tool in Czech, using a picture-based examiner-administered comprehension and production task as a concurrent measure of vocabulary. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Parents of 200 children aged 1;3 to 3;6 were given the screening inventory, in which they were asked if their child says or comprehends each of 40 words. At the same time, children were administered a picture-based comprehension and production task. Concurrent validity of the inventory was examined using correlations, partial correlations, and regression analyses controlling for age. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The partial Spearman correlation (controlling for age) between production scores from parent-report and production scores from the examiner-administered task was 0.53; for comprehension, the correlation between parent report and test scores was 0.36. These values are similar to those reported for short and full versions of MacArthur-Bates CDI for 2-year-olds. CONCLUSION & IMPLICATIONS: A 40-item tool shows clear concurrent relations with an examiner-administered picture comprehension and production task. The study demonstrates that short parent-report tools may be useful in early identification of language impairments, and they may be a good option particularly in languages that have limited repertoire of assessment instruments.

The development of infants' sensitivity to native versus non-native rhythm.

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes. Employing a central-fixation preference paradigm with natural stimuli, this study tested whether infants differentially attend to native versus nonnative varieties that differ only in temporal rhythm cues, and both of which are rhythmically unclassified. An analysis of total looking time did not detect any rhythm preferences at any age. First-look duration, arguably more closely reflecting infants' underlying perceptual sensitivities, indicated age-specific preferences for native versus non-native rhythm: 4-month-olds seemed to prefer the native-, and 6-month-olds the non-native language-variety. These findings suggest that infants indeed acquire native rhythm cues rather early, by the 4th month, supporting the theory that rhythm can bootstrap further language development. Our data on infants' processing of rhythmically unclassified languages suggest that formal rhythm classification does not determine infants' ability to discriminate language varieties.

Perceptual sensitivity to vowel quality and vowel length in the first year of life.

The perceptual attunement to native vowel categories has been reported to occur at 6 months of age. However, some languages contrast vowels both in quality and in length, and whether and how the acquisition of spectral and duration-cued contrasts differs is uncertain. This study traced the development of infants' sensitivity to native (Czech) vowel-length and vowel-quality contrasts. The results suggest that in a vowel-length language, infants learn to categorize vowels in terms of length earlier and/or more robustly than in terms of quality, the representation of which may still be relatively underdeveloped at 10 months of age.

Sentence Imitation With Masked Morphemes in Czech: Memory, Morpheme Frequency, and Morphological Richness.

Purpose This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language and memory skills to sentence imitation performance. Method Seventeen children with LI (5;1-7;6 [years;months]) and 17 vocabulary-matched typically developing (TD) children (3;8-4;11) were administered a sentence imitation task where each sentence had one noun or verb ending replaced by a coughing sound. In addition, a receptive vocabulary and the digit span (backward and forward) tasks were administered. Results Children with LI were significantly less accurate than TD children in sentence imitation task. Both vocabulary and digit span had unique effects on sentence imitation scores. Children with LI were less successful in imitating the target words, especially verbs. However, if they succeeded, their completions of the masked morphemes were no less accurate than in TD children. The accuracy of completions was affected by the morpheme frequency and homophony, but these effects were similar in TD and affected children. Conclusions Sentence imitation is a measure of language skills and verbal memory. Results on morpheme completions are consistent with processing models of LI, but some predictions of the morphological richness model were not confirmed. The results suggest that children with LI might have a deficit in organizing morphosyntactic relations in sentences, rather than in morphological processing proper.

Early infant temperament shapes the nature of mother-infant bonding in the first postpartum year.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined longitudinal relations between maternal bonding and infant temperament in the first nine months after birth. DESIGN: Our sample consisted of 281 women, enrolled at five maternity hospitals, who completed questionnaires during the first week (T1), at six weeks (T2) and nine months postpartum (T3). Maternal bonding was assessed using the Mother-to-Infant Bonding Scale at T1 and T2 and the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire at T3. Infant temperament was measured using the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire, completed by the mothers at T2 and T3. RESULTS: The results of a path model showed a long-term effect flowing from the child to the mother, with infant temperament at T2 predicting maternal bonding at T3 over and above stability in bonding. At T3, bonding was linked more strongly to child temperament at T2 than to child temperament assessed concurrently at T3. Maternal bonding did predict infant temperament, but this was true only of bonding reported at T1 and infant temperament at T2, that is, not of bonding assessed at T2 and infant temperament at T3. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that maternal bonding in the first week postpartum may temporarily affect child temperament, but infant's temperament several weeks after birth - rather than several months postpartum - plays a pervasive role in shaping the long-lasting nature of the mother-child relationship. Our findings thus seem to support the suggestion that the early postpartum weeks represent an important period in the development of maternal bonding.

Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian.

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and were highly reliable in each language. We applied the same method of data collection as used in a previous study on 25 languages which allowed us to create a database of fully comparable AoA ratings of 299 words in 32 languages. We found that in the seven languages not included in the previous study, the words are estimated to be acquired at roughly the same age as in the previously reported languages, i.e. mostly between the ages of 1 and 7 years. We also found that the order of word acquisition is moderately to highly correlated across all 32 languages, which extends our previous conclusion that early words are acquired in similar order across a wide range of languages and cultures.

Assessing longitudinal pathways between maternal depressive symptoms, parenting self-esteem and infant temperament.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies of relations between parenting self-concepts, parental adjustment and child temperament have been ambiguous regarding the direction of influence; and have rarely followed families from pregnancy through the first year of life. The current study examines change and stability in maternal depressive symptoms, parenting competences and child temperament through the perinatal period until nine months postpartum. METHODS: Czech mothers (N = 282) participated at three time points: the third trimester of pregnancy (Time 1), six weeks (Time 2) and nine months postpartum (Time 3). Questionnaire data concerned depressive symptoms (T1, T2, T3), maternal parenting self-esteem (T1, T2) and sense of competence (T3), and child temperament (T2, T3). A path model was used to examine concurrent and longitudinal relations between these variables. RESULTS: The analyses indicated longitudinal stability of all constructs, as well as concurrent relations between them. Longitudinal relations supported child-to-parent, rather than parent-to-child, effects: child difficult temperament predicted decreases in perceived maternal parenting competences, but maternal variables did not predict change in infant temperament. In addition, we observed weak mutual relations between maternal depression levels and parenting competences, such that maternal depression diminished perceived parenting competences that in turn contributed to higher levels of depression. CONCLUSION: Mothers' confidence in their ability to parent is influenced by their experience with a difficult infant and by their depressive symptoms during the child's first year of life. Depressive symptoms are, in turn, aggravated by mothers' low perceived competences in the parenting role.

Imageability and Neighborhood Density Facilitate the Age of Word Acquisition in Czech.

Purpose The study examined the effects of imageability and phonological neighborhood density on the acquisition of word production in Czech, controlling for part-of-speech class, word length, and word frequency. Phonological neighborhood density is of interest because previous research has not examined highly inflected languages such as Czech. The effects of imageability on word acquisition are widely assumed, but only a few empirical studies examined such effects using child data directly. Method Data from the Czech norming study of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories ( Smolík, Turková, Marusincová, & Malechová, 2017 ) adaptation were used, and all nouns and action words in the data set were examined (total 359). Based on the norming sample of 493 children, the expected age of acquisition was calculated. Results A small but significant effect of neighborhood density (explaining 1.5% of unique variance) was found, as well as a robust effect of imageability (9% of unique variance). Imageability also accounted for the difference between nouns and verbs in the age of acquisition. Conclusion Imageability is a robust predictor of word age of acquisition that should be taken into account in future studies. The identifiability of the referent and the memory mechanisms are likely responsible for the strong imageability effect. Words with large phonological neighborhoods are acquired earlier, even in a language with complex inflectional morphology.

Czech 23-month-olds use gender agreement to anticipate upcoming nouns.

Children acquiring Dutch, French, and Spanish can use gender of articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. The current study examined whether a similar effect can be found for bound gender-marking agreement morphemes in Czech, a language without obligatory articles. The experiment was designed so that the anticipatory effects of gender-marking morphemes before the head noun onset could be observed. In a preferential looking experiment, 33 children (aged 21-24 months) were shown picture pairs that could be labeled with masculine and feminine nouns. They heard a phrase comprising a demonstrative, an adjective, and a noun, where the first two elements were inflected for gender. The inflections were either correct (matching the noun gender) or incorrect (mismatched). Children were also given offline receptive grammar and vocabulary tasks. The group of children as a whole did not show significant differences in looking behavior between the experimental conditions. When split by the grammar task, the high-scoring children showed significant differences between looks toward the target noun in the matched and mismatched conditions even before the onset of the target noun. No significant difference was observed in the low-scoring group and in the groups split by vocabulary. Results suggest that knowledge of the gender system is just emerging before the second birthday and that more advanced children can use gender information encoded in bound morphemes to actively anticipate the upcoming nouns.

Propositional Density in Spoken and Written Language of Czech-Speaking Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Purpose: Propositional density (PD) is a measure of content richness in language production that declines in normal aging and more profoundly in dementia. The present study aimed to develop a PD scoring system for Czech and use it to compare PD in language productions of older people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and control participants matched on age, gender, and education. Method: Groups of patients with aMCI and cognitively healthy control participants (N = 20 each) provided short spoken and written language samples. Two samples were elicited for each modality, 1 describing recent events and 1 describing childhood memories. Series of neuropsychological tests were administered. The groups were compared using t-tests and the relations between measures using correlation coefficients. Results: PD was lower in spoken productions of patients with aMCI, compared with control participants, but only in language samples using remote memories. PD in these samples was related to verbal fluency and education but not to working memory. PD in written samples did not differ between participants with aMCI and control participants. Conclusions: PD in spoken language reflects the cognitive decline in people with aMCI, but the effect is relatively mild. The results support the existing findings that PD is related to verbal fluency.

Victimization and its associations with peer rejection and fear of victimization: Moderating effects of individual-level and classroom-level characteristics.

BACKGROUND: Past research has shown that peer victimization by bullying is associated with peer rejection and fear of victimization, but little is known about the interplay between victimization and other characteristics in the prediction of these experiences. We assume that the associations between victimization and peer rejection/fear of victimization are moderated by multiple characteristics, including aspects of peer ecology. AIMS: The study tested whether the links between victimization and peer rejection/fear of victimization are moderated by gender, peer support, and two features of classroom peer ecology: classroom victimization rate and classroom hierarchy (the variability of popularity among students). SAMPLE: The sample included 512 early adolescents attending sixth grade retrieved from 25 elementary school classrooms. METHODS: Participants completed a set of self-report and peer nomination instruments in classroom settings. RESULTS: Multilevel linear modelling showed that higher levels of peer rejection were associated with higher victimization, male gender, and lower peer support. The association between victimization and peer rejection was attenuated for females and when the classroom victimization rate was higher. A higher fear of victimization was related to higher victimization, female gender, lower peer support, and a higher classroom victimization rate. The link between victimization and fear of victimization was strengthened by female gender and higher levels of classroom hierarchy. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate the relevance of the interplay between victimization and gender and between victimization and classroom peer ecology in understanding peer rejection and fear of victimization.

Sentence imitation as a marker of SLI in Czech: disproportionate impairment of verbs and clitics.

PURPOSE: The authors examined sentence imitation as a potential clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in Czech and its use to identify grammatical markers of SLI. METHOD: Children with SLI and the age- and language-matched control groups (total N = 57) were presented with a sentence imitation task, a receptive vocabulary task, and digit span and nonword repetition tasks. Sentence imitations were scored for accuracy and error types. A separate count of inaccuracies for individual part-of-speech categories was performed. RESULTS: Children with SLI had substantially more inaccurate imitations than the control groups. The differences in the memory measures could not account for the differences between children with SLI and the control groups in imitation accuracy, even though they accounted for the differences between the language-matched and age-matched control groups. The proportion of grammatical errors was larger in children with SLI than in the control groups. The categories that were most affected in imitations of children with SLI were verbs and clitics. CONCLUSION: Sentence imitation is a sensitive marker of SLI. Verbs and clitics are the most vulnerable categories in Czech SLI. The pattern of errors suggests that impaired syntactic representations are the most likely source of difficulties in children with SLI.

Noun imageability facilitates the acquisition of plurals: survival analysis of plural emergence in children.

Some research in child language suggests that semantically general verbs appear in grammatical structures earlier than semantically complex, specific ones. The present study examines whether this was the case in nouns, using imageability as a proxy measure of semantic generality. Longitudinal corpus data from 12 children from the Manchester corpus in CHILDES were used to obtain information on the first occurrence of plurals. A total of 3,560 uninflected nouns were identified in the corpora, of which 1,202 were observed in the plural. Survival analyses indicated that the chance of observing a plural form increases with the imageability rating of the noun, even after accounting for the age of acquisition of the uninflected noun, maternal input frequency, and word length. Noun imageability thus facilitates the acquisition of plural forms. This finding contradicts the observations from verbs, and indicates that the acquisition of grammar is facilitated by high imageability rather than semantic generality.

Mean length of utterance levels in 6-month intervals for children 3 to 9 years with and without language impairments.

PURPOSE: The mean length of children's utterances is a valuable estimate of their early language acquisition. The available normative data lack documentation of language and nonverbal intelligence levels of the samples. This study reports age-referenced mean length of utterance (MLU) data from children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children without language impairments. METHOD: Of the 306 child participants drawn from a data archive, ages 2;6-9;0 (years;months), 170 were in the SLI group and 136 were in the control group. There were 1,564 spontaneous language samples collected, and these were transcribed and analyzed for sample size and MLU in words and morphemes. Means, standard deviations, and effect sizes for group differences are reported for MLUs, along with concurrent language and nonverbal intelligence assessments, per 6-month intervals. RESULTS: The results document an age progression in MLU words and morphemes and a persistent lower level of performance for children with SLI. CONCLUSION: The results support the reliability and validity of MLU as an index of normative language acquisition and a marker of language impairment. The findings can be used for clinical benchmarking of deficits and language intervention outcomes as well as for comparisons across research samples.