Reactivity of the triple task on writing processes and product in adults with dyslexia.

Introduction: The triple task (TT) is a method for assessing the dynamics of writing processes. It involves three tasks in one: writing a text, responding to a sound, and reporting the process. Previous research has mostly shown that the TT does not affect the writing process or the product. However, individuals with dyslexia often show difficulties in tasks that require organization, automation, integration of multiple processes, inhibition, and shifting/cognitive flexibility. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate whether TT affects the writing process and written product differently in adults with dyslexia compared to a control group of adults with typical reading skills. Methods: Two groups of adult native Croatian speakers were included in this study: 20 adults with developmental dyslexia and 20 adults with typical reading skills; evenly distributed by: age (18-38 years), gender (13 males, 7 females per group), educational level, and nonverbal cognitive abilities. All participants wrote one text with a TT and another without. The writing of the text was tracked with a keystroke logging program - Inputlog. The two texts were compared at process and product level. Results and discussion: The results showed that measures of writing processes and text quality in the groups of adults with dyslexia and adults with typical reading skills were unlikely to be differentially affected by TT. However, in the condition without TT, the total number of characters per minute was higher, more keys were typed per minute and more words were deleted. As expected, adults with dyslexia produced shorter texts of lower quality and with more errors; they also produced fewer characters per minute, used fewer keystrokes and typed fewer. Conclusion: The study suggests that TT is unlikely to have a different impact on the writing process or written product in adults with dyslexia compared to adults with typical reading skills.

Parental reports on language development in toddlers and preschoolers based on the Croatian version of Communicative Development Inventories III.

Introduction: Previous studies have focused on understanding parental attempts to record language development in children, across many typologically different languages. However, many of these studies restricted their assessment to children up to the age of 3 years. The aim of this paper was to move this boundary by examining language development in typically language developed children older than 3 years. Methods: Using the Croatian version of the Communicative Development Inventories III (CDI-III-HR), we investigated the contribution of parental reports of a child's lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities to general language abilities assessed by clinicians. Participants included the parents of 151 children between the ages of 30 to 48 months, who completed the CDI-III-HR and reported on their child's language abilities. Results: Our results show that age is significantly associated with the lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities of a child's language development. These findings confirm that all three abilities increase with age and that parents can perceive changes in a child's language development. The subsections of CDI-III-HR were moderately to strongly associated with each other, with the strongest association being between lexicon and grammar, suggesting that they remain closely related after the age of 30 months. Parental assessments of a child's language development are a better predictor of language production than language comprehension, with grammar making the most consistent and significant contribution. Discussion: This study confirms that the development of grammatical abilities is the most prominent skill between the ages of 30 to 48 months and that parents can observe the transition in the child's language development through their usage of grammar in words to grammar in sentences. Based on the selected sample of children, we discovered different patterns of parental success in assessing the child's language ability. These findings indicate that parents can act as valuable sources of information regarding the child's language abilities, but clinical assessments of early language development should consider many other formal sources of information in addition to parental reports.

Personal Narratives of School-Age Children: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study.

INTRODUCTION: Personal narratives are monological stories based on a personal experience that help children explain and understand their emotional states, as well as process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to identify age- and emotion-related traits of lexical and grammatical abilities and coherence of personal stories produced by school-aged children between 7 and 13 years. METHODS: A total of 60 typically developing children, speakers of Croatian, were stratified into three groups according to age. Using the Global TALES protocol, each child was asked to produce six personal stories prompted by different emotional states. The personal narratives were analysed using measures of lexical diversity (lemma-token ratio and number of different words), productivity (total number of words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterances and clausal density). Based on the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme, three coherence dimensions (context, chronology, and theme) were rated. RESULTS: Age group was shown to explain 18% of the variance in the ability to produce personal narratives. Personal narratives elicited through positive prompts were overall more lexically diverse but were significantly less elaborated chronologically and thematically than negative and neutral narratives. CONCLUSION: This study showed that coherence of the produced stories was connected with the child's lexicon and that both variables - lexicon and coherence - were influenced by emotional valence of the story. In contrast, grammatical aspects of the narrative were influenced only by age. Finally, it is possible to state that the Global TALES protocol is sensitive enough to capture specificities of creating personal stories, both developmental ones and those created under the influence of the emotional valence of the prompts.

Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world.

Personal narratives make up more than half of children's conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children's ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy. The current study addresses this gap in the research by developing the Global TALES protocol, a protocol comprising six scripted prompts for eliciting personal narratives in school-age children (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). We evaluated its feasibility with 249 ten-year-old children from 10 different countries, speaking 8 different languages, and analyzed researchers' views on the process of adapting the protocol for use in their own country/language. At group-level, the protocol elicited discourse samples from all children, although individual variability was evident, with most children providing responses to all six prompts. When investigating the topics of children's personal narratives in response to the prompts, we found that children from around the world share many commonalities regarding topics of conversation. Once again individual variability was high, indicating the protocol is effective in prompting children to share their past personal experiences without forcing them to focus on one particular topic. Feedback from the participating researchers on the use of the protocol in their own countries was generally positive, although several translation issues were noted. Based on our results, we now invite clinical researchers from around the world to join us in conducting further research into this important area of practice to obtain a better understanding of the development of personal narratives from children across different languages and cultures and to begin to establish local benchmarks of performance.

Public awareness of developmental language disorder in Croatia, Italy and Slovenia.

BACKGROUND: Previous research, although scarce, has indicated that the general public is still relatively unaware of developmental language disorder (DLD), one of the most common (neuro)developmental disorders. Raising awareness would increase timely involvement in intervention procedures. AIMS: To examine public awareness of DLD in the neighbouring countries of Croatia, Italy and Slovenia, as well as to assess the influence of age, gender and education level on that awareness. Also, to investigate public knowledge about the professionals who recognize DLD and to compare the awareness of DLD with that of other (neuro)developmental disorders in childhood. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A convenience sample of adults living in the countries of the Adriatic region-Croatia (N = 92), Italy (N = 105) and Slovenia (N = 90)-were asked to fill out a paper-and-pencil questionnaire (public survey) developed within the Working Group 3 of the COST Action IS1406. Responses were analysed quantitatively as a function of age, gender, education level and country using the t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Public awareness of DLD is still unsatisfactory in all three countries. Around 70% of respondents reported having heard of DLD; however, only around 20% of Croatian, 40% of Italian and 5% of Slovenian respondents provided an adequate definition of DLD. Differences in research and clinical traditions may explain the observed variations amongst the three countries. Education level was the only variable that was significantly associated with an awareness of DLD in Croatia and Italy: there, more educated people showed a higher awareness and more correct knowledge, which was not found in the Slovenian sample. Respondents generally perceived speech and language pathologists (SLPs) as the professionals responsible for recognizing DLD. Finally, people possess the highest awareness of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while the awareness of DLD and other (neuro)developmental disorders is equally low. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Public awareness of DLD varies substantially among the three countries, but there is space for improvement in each of them. The findings of this study build on the existing data from the international group of collaborators, and argue for well-planned, systematic awareness-raising activities in the region. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject DLD is one of the most common (neuro)developmental disorders, yet it is not well known to the general public. This low awareness hinders timely recognition and adequate intervention, which can have negative psychosocial and emotional consequences for affected individuals. It is known that the awareness of any disorder can depend on one's demographic characteristics, but levels of awareness of DLD are still not examined in detail. What this study adds to existing knowledge Public awareness of DLD is moderate in Croatia, Italy and Slovenia, but many individuals who report having heard of it appear to misunderstand what it actually is. Of various demographic factors tested, only education significantly influenced public awareness in Croatia and Italy, where more educated people possess greater knowledge. Moreover, respondents generally perceived SLPs as professionals responsible for recognizing DLD. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Professionals and researchers should focus on raising DLD awareness in the general public of these three countries, and may need to target different demographic groups accordingly.

Influence of internal and external factors on early language skills: A cross-linguistic study.

Cross-linguistic studies can provide information about general and language specific features of language development, but relatively few such studies are available in literature. The main aim of the present study was to investigate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the roles of the internal factor of gender and external factors of birth order and parental education level on the development of language in 2-year-old children. We examined 351 children growing up in three European language contexts: Croatian (N = 104), Estonian (N = 141) and Finnish (N = 106). Information on lexical skills and word combination ability was collected using the short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and the influence of background factors on these aspects of language development was investigated. No significant differences were found in lexical skills or word combination ability among the three language groups. These aspects of language development varied significantly with gender, but not with external factors. Our findings suggest that internal factors may influence early language development more than external factors.

Cross-linguistic adaptations of The Comprehensive Aphasia Test: Challenges and solutions.

Comparative research on aphasia and aphasia rehabilitation is challenged by the lack of comparable assessment tools across different languages. In English, a large array of tools is available, while in most other languages, the selection is more limited. Importantly, assessment tools are often simple translations and do not take into consideration specific linguistic and psycholinguistic parameters of the target languages. As a first step in meeting the needs for comparable assessment tools, the Comprehensive Aphasia Test is currently being adapted into a number of languages spoken in Europe. In this article, some key challenges encountered in the adaptation process and the solutions to ensure that the resulting assessment tools are linguistically and culturally equivalent, are proposed. Specifically, we focus on challenges and solutions related to the use of imageability, frequency, word length, spelling-to-sound regularity and sentence length and complexity as underlying properties in the selection of the testing material.

Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some…not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.