This research explored whether variation in working memory ability helps account for the wide variation in toddlers' language skills and improves predictive models of language outcomes over time. A cohort of typically developing (TD) (n = 55) and late talking children (n = 24) were assessed at two time points. The initial assessment took place at ages 24-30 months and the outcome assessment occurred 18 months later, when the children were aged 41-49 months. The assessment battery included standardised tests of language and visual cognition; assessments representing aspects of Baddeley's model of working memory: phonological short term memory (PSTM), a measure of processing speed, verbal working memory (VWM), visual spatial working memory (VSWM), and a parent report questionnaire of executive functioning (EF). Study 1 explored the associations between these aspects of working memory and concurrent expressive vocabulary at ages 24-30 months and examined group differences in the measures between TD and late talking children. Study 2 explored associations between aspects of working memory and concurrent expressive language in the same cohort at 41-49 months of age. Group differences in the measures between resolved late talkers (RLTs) and TD children were explored. Finally Study 3 explored the ability of the measures used at 24-30 months to predict language outcomes at 41-49 months. These results were considered in relation to the prediction of language outcomes on group and individual levels. Overall the results indicated a strong relationship between early PSTM and early language measures. A novel finding was that PSTM was significantly lower in the late talking and RLT groups compared with the TD groups, even after controlling for group differences in language and phonology at both time points. This confirms previous research that PSTM plays a role in early expressive vocabulary acquisition, and suggests that early PSTM deficits may be a causal factor for some cases of late talking. For the whole group, three working memory variables (VWM, Emotional Control and Shift) measured at 24-30 months added unique variance to predictive models in total language scores at 41-49 months after previously established early predictors (receptive language and parent education) had been entered into the hierarchical regression model (receptive language R²Δ = 59%; parent education R²Δ = 2%; VWM R²Δ = 8%; Emotional Control R²Δ = 1% and Shift R²Δ = 2%). This is another novel finding which supports the concept of working memory playing a unique role in language acquisition between the ages two and four years. Processing speed did not contribute unique variance to regression models predicting language when other working memory measures were included. The A not B task (measuring VSWM) did not correlate with language. There were concerns with construct validity with the EF parent report measure (Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function – Preschool Version), which meant that the results from this assessment were interpreted with caution. In terms of clinical outcomes, 83% of the late talkers resolved their language delays over the 18 month period, but as a group showed a seven-fold increase in being identified for clinical concerns at the outcome assessment than children who were not late talkers. The majority of these concerns were for poor phonology. While early VWM, Shift and Emotional Control added unique variance to outcome total language scores on a group level, they did not improve prediction of individual outcomes in language impairment status at 41-49 months. Early receptive language delay was a more powerful predictor of later language impairment than late talking in this cohort, as these children (n = 9) showed only a 44% rate of resolution.

Researchers have hypothesized that for people with autism, the deficits in learning certain tasks may be a function of deficits in learning the prerequisite auditory, visual and motor discriminations. The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) Test is a useful tool by which these discriminations are assessed. This study investigated whether performance on ABLA Level 6, an auditory-visual discrimination, predicts performance on a receptive language task with children with autism. Participants included five children who passed ABLA Level 6, four children who passed ABLA Level 4 but failed ABLA Level 6, and one child who passed ABLA Level 3 but failed ABLA Level 4. Standardized prompting and reinforcement procedures were used to attempt to teach each participant to respond correctly on ten name-recognition tasks. During a task pictures of two objects were placed in randomly alternated left-right positions, and a child was required to point to the picture that was named. Training on a task continued until either a pass or a fail criterion was met, whichever came first. Three of the Level 4 participants passed all ten of the picture name recognition tasks, and one passed eight of the ten tasks. The Level 3 participant passed two of the ten tasks. All five of the Level 6 participants passed all picture name recognition tasks. The difference in performance between children at ABLA Level 4 and Level 6 was not significant at the .05 level. These results suggest that children with autism at ABLA Level 4 or 6 are approximately equally capable of learning receptive name recognition tasks.

Huvudsyftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur förskollärare arbetar med flerspråkiga barn i förskolan. Jag valde att använda mig av en kvalitativ intervjumetod, då jag ville ha pedagogernas resonemang och åsikter. Båda förskolorna som jag har varit på och gjort mina intervjuer på visar att pedagogerna visar ett stort intresse genom sin nyfikenhet av att lära sig ord och fraser på barnens olika språk. Pedagogerna tar sin hjälp genom att de använder sig av föräldrarna för att få tillgång till ord och fraser som hjälper pedagogerna i verksamheten. Det är övervägande bland pedagogerna att de uppmuntrar barnen om att prata sitt modersmål även på förskolan med varandra, pedagogerna påpekar även hur viktigt det är att föräldrarna pratar sitt modersmål hemma med barnen. Pedagogerna vill att varje barn ska känna stolthet över sitt ursprung, språk och kultur. Förskolorna använder sig av sång, musik och sagor, de delade även in barnen i smågrupper för att alla ska få komma till tals. Ladberg skriver om att sagor är ett bra och rikt material där barnen lär sig nya ord. Hon poängterar även att det är bra att dela in barnen i smågrupper där barnen är ungefär i samma språkliga nivå. Barn som inte förstår ledsnar och tappar koncentrationen, ger upp ”stänger av” för språket. Sagor läses bäst i smågrupper (Ladberg 2003, s. 157, 158). Resultatet visar att pedagogerna visar ett förhållningssätt som bygger på en nyfikenhet hos pedagogerna, lyssnar, samtalar och forskar tillsammans med barnen. Pedagogerna ger barnen en delaktighet genom att plocka fram barnens läroprocesser och utveckling genom läroplansmålen (Lpfö 98 reviderad 2010, s. 9, 10). / The main purpose of this study was to look how preschool teatchers work with multilingual children in preschool. I chose to use a qualitative interview method, since the teachers reasoning and opinions were at value. That was my interest in this study. Both preschools that I have been to and done my interviews at show a great interest by their curiosity to learn words and phrases in different languages. The teachers use the children´s parents for access for new words. It is predominant among the teachers to encourage the children to speak their mother tongue with each other in preschool, and the teachers also point out how important it is that the parents speak the mother tongue at home with the children. The teatchers wish is that every child should feel proud of their origin, language and culture. The preschool used song, music and fairy tales and they also divided the children into smaller groups so everyone could have their say. Ladberg describes how fairy tales are a good and abundant material were the children learn new words. She also points out that it´s good to divide the children into differnet small groups were they´re approximately at the same level. Children who don´t understand become sad and lose their concentration, give up ”shut down” the language. The best way is to read fairy tales in small groups (Ladberg 2003, s. 157, 158). The difficulty to work with multilingual children is that the teachers sometimes don´t know if the children understand what teachers are saying. The result shows that the teachers show an approach, which is based on curiosity of the teachers and listen, converse, and do research togheter with the children. The teachers give the children participation by bring out children´s processing of learning and development by the goals of the curriculum (Lpfö 98 2010, s. 9, 10).

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/12). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.H.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. "May 2008" Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma. / Bibliography: leaves 110-120.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005. / "May 2005." Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 32-33). Also issued on the Internet.

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker’s intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, ‘what did you put in the bag?’, the speaker says, ‘I put in a book’, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning – a quantity implicature – involves reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state. This thesis examines children’s development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker’s epistemic state is part of children’s pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children’s development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill – implicatures – and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children’s early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker’s epistemic state is at stake. I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with children’s pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge – and, associated with it, socioeconomic status – is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on children’s ability to take into account the speaker’s epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.

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The overarching purpose of both dissertation studies is to contribute to the extant literature base on language assessment in the context of poverty and African American English (AAE) dialect. Language assessment with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, in particular children who speak AAE, has been a longstanding challenge for professionals in the field of speech-language pathology despite the preponderance of scholarly attention this topic has received. The purpose of the first study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature to synthesize the existing literature on AAE from the past approximately three and a half decades, to identify aspects of language and assessment approaches that have been most informative for identifying language impairment in this population. The purpose of the second study is to examine the grammaticality judgments of school-age, AAE-speaking children as a function of their nonmainstream dialect density and language ability. Data for this study came from 273 African American children from low-income backgrounds who were participants in a larger project focused on language and literacy outcomes for children reared in urban areas. the relationship between language ability and dialect density was explored using correlational analysis and the contribution of language ability and dialect density on grammaticality judgments was analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate the impact of dialect density and language ability on various items that differed in grammatical constructions. Results from both studies are discussed relative to the existing oral language profiles of AAE speakers and the impact of linguistic variation on assessment. Together, these papers contribute to the extant literature by supporting the development of a more comprehensive profile of AAE and increasing the field's understanding of language assessment and language impairment in child AAE speakers.