Person:

Rowe, Meredith

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether linguistic input plays a similar role in children with BI as it does in typically developing (TD) children. Growth in vocabulary and syntactic production is modeled for 80 children (53 TD, 27 BI) between 14 and 46 months. Findings indicate that caregiver input is an equally potent predictor of vocabulary growth in children with BI and in TD children. In contrast, input is a more potent predictor of syntactic growth for children with BI than for TD children. Controlling for input, lesion characteristics (lesion size, type, seizure history) also affect the language trajectories of children with BI. Thus, findings illustrate how both variability in the environment (linguistic input) and variability in the organism (lesion characteristics) work together to contribute to plasticity in language learning.

Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). We found that child gesture use at 14 months was a significant predictor of vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months. Parent gesture use at 14 months was not directly related to vocabulary development, but did relate to child gesture use at 14 months which, in turn, predicted child vocabulary. These relations hold even when background factors such as socio-economic status are controlled. The findings underscore the importance of examining early gesture when predicting child vocabulary development.

This article addresses the question of whether literacy could be mediating the relationships of schooling to maternal health behavior in populations undergoing demographic transition. Recent studies in which literacy was directly assessed suggest a literacy pathway to demographic change. The literacy skills of 167 urban and rural mothers of school-aged children in Lalitpur District of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal were assessed by tests of reading comprehension, academic language proficiency, health media skills and health narrative skill, as part of studies in the urban and rural communitiesthat included a maternal interview and ethnographic fieldwork on the contexts of family life, health care and female schooling. Regression analysis of the data indicates the retention of literacy skills in adulthood and their influence on health behavior; ethnographic evidence shows that selective bias in school attainment does not account for the results. Further direct assessment studies are recommended.

This study investigated predictors of growth in toddlers’ vocabulary production between the ages of 1 and 3 years by analyzing mother – child communication in 108 low-income families. Individual growth modeling was used to describe patterns of growth in children’s observed vocabulary production and predictors of initial status and between-person change. Results indicate large variation in growth across children. Observed variation was positively related to diversity of maternal lexical input and maternal language and literacy skills, and negatively related to maternal depression. Maternal talkativeness was not related to growth in children’s vocabulary production in this sample. Implications of the examination of longitudinal data from this relatively large sample of low-income families are discussed.

This article addresses the mechanisms by which women’s schooling might affect the survival and health of their children. A theoretical model is proposed in which academic literacy skills serve as a pathway between formal schooling and maternal health-related behaviors. The model is tested through multivariate analyses of interview and literacy data from 161 mothers in a poor, urban community in Venezuela. Results show that the academic literacy skills women learned in school and retained into adulthood, predict their health-related communication skills above and beyond the amount of schooling they received. The importance of female schooling in developing countries is discussed.

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers’ productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory – Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and standardized language assessments, and the utility of each source of data for predicting receptive vocabulary at age 3;0 (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) was evaluated. Relations between language measures of interest and background variables such as maternal age, education, and race/ethnicity were also considered. Results showed that for the sample as a whole, parental report was moderately associated with other language measures at age 2;0 and accounted for unique variance in PPVT at age 3;0, controlling for child language skills derived from a standard cognitive assessment. However, predictive validity differed by community, being stronger in the rural than in the urban community. Implications of significant differences in background characteristics of mothers in the two sites are discussed.

Objective. The goals of this study were (1) to examine the extent of variation in amount and lexical diversity of maternal talk to young children within a sample of low-income families, (2) to determine the patterns of change over time in maternal talk during the early childhood years, and (3) to consider specific predictors of variation in maternal communicative input. Design. Low-income mother – child dyads (n = 108) were videotaped at child ages 14, 24, and 36 months during semistructured play in the home. Videotapes were transcribed and analyzed using the conventions of the Child Language Data Exchange System to determine amount (word tokens) and lexical diversity (word types) of maternal talk to children. Background information collected from mothers at study entry served as predictors of variation in communicative input. Individual growth modeling methods were used to analyze data. Results. Mothers varied greatly in the number of tokens and types produced during interaction. Mothers were found to increase in their total amount of talk and diversity of vocabulary as children aged. In addition to child age, maternal education, language and literacy skills, depression, and age helped explain variation in level of maternal talk, but none of the predictors explained variation in growth. Different combinations of predictors explained variation in tokens versus types. Conclusions. Findings highlight the importance of studying specific predictors of parental talk to children, as even in low-income samples large variation in communicative input is evident.

The gestures children produce predict the early stages of spoken language development. Here we ask whether gesture is a global predictor of language learning, or whether particular gestures predict particular language outcomes. We observed 52 children interacting with their caregivers at home, and found that gesture use at 18 months selectively predicted lexical versus syntactic skills at 42 months, even with early child speech controlled. Specifically, number of different meanings conveyed in gesture at 18 months predicted vocabulary at 42 months, but number of gesture+speech combinations did not. In contrast, number of gesture + speech combinations, particularly those conveying sentence-like ideas, produced at 18 months predicted sentence complexity at 42 months, but meanings conveyed in gesture did not. We can thus predict particular milestones in vocabulary and sentence complexity at age 3 and a half by watching how children move their hands two years earlier.