This study used the largest and youngest cohort of hearing impaired (HI) children to investigate the effect age at implantation had on the trajectories of expressive and receptive language, and externalizing behavior problems. In addition, the temporal relationship between language and externalizing behavior problems was examined in children implanted before and after the age of 2. Univariate latent difference score analyses were conducted to test the effect of age at implantation on each trajectory and bivariate difference score analyses were conducted to test the temporal effect between language and externalizing behavior problems. Results showed that age at implantation had an effect on the initial level and growth of expressive and receptive language trajectory and an effect on the initial level of externalizing behavior problems. Expressive language was found to have an influence on the changes in externalizing behavior problems for both groups, children implanted before and after the age of 2. However, the relationship between receptive language and externalizing behavior problems differed between the two age groups. The effect was bidirectional for the younger group but unidirectional for the older group, with externalizing behavior problems influenced the change in receptive language. Future research and potential interventions to improve behavior difficulties in deaf children are discussed.

Language skills developed in early childhood are important for literacy and communication in childhood as well as future adult literacy skills and health. Certain demographic characteristics and parent-child interaction skills have been identified through previous research as being influential in child language development. Parental stress has also been associated with child language outcomes. This study aims to explore whether parents’ interactive relational skills, measured by an observational method, are significantly related to children’s verbal outcome, while controlling for demographic variables and parental stress. Participants included mothers of children aged 4-6 who completed measures of parental interaction quality, parental stress, and demographic characteristics. Their children competed a language skill measure. Results indicated that even when controlling for demographic variables and parental stress, the relationship between parent-child interaction quality and child language outcomes remained significant. These findings suggest that increasing positive parent-child interaction skills may be beneficial for increasing children’s language skills.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

The structure of phonological processing for typically developing children has been debated over the past two decades. Recent research has indicated that phonological processing is best explained by a single underlying phonological ability (e.g., Anthony and Lonigan, 2004). The current study had two goals. The first goal was to determine the structure of phonological processing for school-age children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). The second goal was to determine the relationship between the components of phonological processing and expressive and receptive language ability. The participants were 222 school-age children identified by their schools as having MID. Confirmatory factor analysis was utilized to determine the structure of phonological processing. The results indicated that a model with one phonological awareness factor and one naming speed factor explained the data better than competing models with a single latent factor or more than two latent factors. There was a negative significant relationship between phonological processing and naming speed. There were positive bivariate relationships between phonological processing and expressive and receptive language. There were negative bivariate relationships between naming speed and expressive and receptive language. These results are consistent with other research findings with typically developing children, indicating a similarity in the relationships between phonological process and language for children with MID. Theoretical and instructional implications are discussed.

Research has demonstrated a close relationship between verbal short-term (STM) and working memory (WM) and receptive language in children (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Ellis & Sinclair, 1996). Few studies have examined the relationship between memory and language production, and these studies focus on STM only. Though correlations have been found between verbal STM and production, the nature of the correlations are unclear. The current study examined the possibility that receptive language mediates the relationship between memory and language production. Children between 3;0 and 5;11 were administered tests assessing receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, verbal STM, and verbal WM. Additionally, transcripts from free-play sessions were used to assess grammar production. A regression based analytic approach revealed STM and WM mediate the relationship between receptive language and productive language. The existence of these mediated relationships are discussed in relation to the role of working memory in the speech output buffer.

A research review of eleven studies pertaining to receptive language performance among nonverbal, school-age children with cerebral palsy was completed. The purpose of this review was to identify components and predictor variables of receptive language growth among the target population. The studies were analyzed to further explore how limited verbal output related to comprehension level and to determine appropriate expectations for receptive abilities within the target population. Results suggested that language performances within the domains of verbal and written comprehension were generally lower compared to children matched for chronological age. However, performances were also highly variable among the target population, indicating the potential for typical receptive language development despite impaired expressive abilities. In addition, the following variables demonstrated predictive patterns across subjects: type of cerebral palsy, home literacy environment, and reading status. Clinical implications, including assessment and treatment planning considerations that are sensitive to unique developmental patterns demonstrated in the target population, are discussed. The empirical focus on language output and the use of mixed age groups in current studies on cerebral palsy warrant future research. Additional investigations of receptive language growth as it relates to specific age groups within this clinical population are needed. / text

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The development of a standardized assessment can, in general, be broken into multiple stages. In the first, items to be used in the assessment are generated according to the skills and abilities that are to be assessed and the needs of the developers. These items are then, ideally, tested in the field on members of the population for which the assessment is intended. Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis is used to reveal items in the item pool which are unusable due to measurement error, redundancy in the level of item difficulty, or bias. More potential items may be generated and tested until there is a set of valid items with which the developers can move forward. The present study focused on the steps of item tryout and analysis for the establishment of demonstrable item-level validity. Fifty-one potential test items were analyzed for a version of the Shirts and Shoes Test (Plante & Vance, 2012) for 6-year-olds. A total of 23 items were discarded due to error in one or more of the measures mentioned above, and one item was discarded due to its low difficulty. The remaining 27 items were deemed suitable for the 6-year-old population.

This study aimed to test the effectiveness of classroom translations of some laboratory procedures for teaching simple auditory discriminations to learners with developmental disabilities. Three participants with autism and mental retardation were trained to make topographically distinct responses in the presence of two different stimuli, either a pure tone and silence, or two tones. A portable electronic piano keyboard was used to produce tones. Delayed prompt and differential reinforcement procedures were used to teach the responses. None of the participants performed the discriminations accurately without prompting despite numerous revisions to the procedures.