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At least 667 records · Page 37Linked to original sources
PubMed1991

Early genital naming.

To evaluate the clinical impression that young girls are given little or confusing information about their genitals, a sample of 117 mothers with 1- to 4-year-old children were asked which words for genitals, if any, they used with their children. The ethnically and socioeconomically heterogeneous sample was composed of 63 girls and 54 boys, with the average ages of 26 and 29 months, respectively. Neither boys nor girls were likely to be given a standard anatomical genital term, although many children received colorful colloquial expressions. However, girls were less likely than boys to receive a term for their genitals. Receiving names for genitals was related to certain family circumstances, such as higher parental education, exposure to adult male nudity, having a sibling of the opposite sex, and cosleeping. Pediatric health professionals have the opportunity to contribute to early sex education by conveying accurate information regarding genital terms in the course of routine physical examinations.

Child Language↗
PubMed2001

Development of syllable structure in English-speaking children with particular reference to rhymes.

This study investigates acquisition of the rhyme using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from 14 English-speaking children (aged 1;3-2;0). It focuses on 4 questions pertaining to rhyme development, which are motivated from current theories of prosodic acquisition: 1. Do children make vowel length errors in early acquisition?; 2. Do children acquire coda consonants before they learn the vowel length contrast?; 3. What consonants are first acquired as codas?; and 4. Is there a size constraint such that children's productions are minimally and maximally bimoraic? The results indicate that the percentage of vowel length errors across all children was low irrespective of the percentage of codas produced. In particular, two children produced very few coda consonants and made few vowel length errors, suggesting that mastery of vowel length was not secondary to coda acquisition. With respect to coda segments, children produced voiceless obstruents as codas before sonorants supporting generally the claim that obstruents emerge before sonorants in coda position. Children produced coda consonants more frequently after short than long vowels consistent with a bimoraic size constraint in syllable development. The paper concludes by comparing the English findings with cross-linguistic work on vowel length acquisition.

Child Language↗
PubMed2005

Specific language impairment and child care by a domestic helper: a case-control study in Chinese children.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the relationship between child care by domestic helper and specific language impairment (SLI). DESIGN: Retrospective case-control study. SETTING: A Child Assessment Center in Hong Kong that receives referrals from primary and secondary care settings. PARTICIPANTS: We reviewed medical records of all new referrals younger than 5 years during a 4-year period (1999-2003) and compared children with SLI (cases) with those referred with other behavioral problems and assessed to have normal language and overall development (controls) using the Griffiths Mental Developmental Scale. Specific language impairment was defined as a language quotient more than 1 SD below the mean and below the general developmental quotient in children with normal general developmental quotient but without neurological or other organic diseases. RESULTS: Four hundred ninety-six children were included (237 cases and 259 controls). The mean ages of cases and controls were 2.51 and 2.89 years, respectively. Boys predominated (cases = 73.4%, controls = 60.2%). The odds ratio (OR) of SLI for children cared for by a full-time domestic helper was 1.71 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.06-2.77; P = .03), after adjusting for confounding sociodemographic variables. Male gender (OR = 1.91; 95% CI, 1.25-2.90), positive family history (OR = 2.70; 95% CI, 1.55-4.73), fewer siblings (P = .01), and lower paternal occupational status (P = .01) were also risk factors for an SLI. Childcare by a domestic helper was associated with a higher severity of an SLI in ordinal regression analysis (P = .048). CONCLUSIONS: Childcare by a domestic helper is associated with increasing risk and severity of an SLI. Further studies are required to confirm the association and to evaluate whether avoidance of childcare by a domestic helper could be recommended for children with an SLI or prone to develop an SLI.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Developing assistive technology strategies for infants and toddlers with communication difficulties.

Communication is a process that begins at birth and continues throughout life. For young children with developmental delay or disability, the acquisition of expected communication skills may be compromised. Compromised communication skills, in turn, may lead to additional challenges when participating in daily activities and routines, forming social relationships, and developing independence. Assistive technology (AT) is one means by which a child's current communication skills can be expanded and enhanced within the child's natural environment. Increased awareness by both parents and professionals of the availability of AT has led to the inclusion of AT strategies within routine day-to-day early intervention practices. This article briefly highlights early aspects of communication development in typically developing infants and toddlers, then provides a framework through which AT strategies can be identified and utilized by parents and professionals to improve a child's existing communication skills.

Child Development↗
PubMed1995

Early intervention for hearing impairment: differences in the timing of communicative and linguistic development.

This paper reports in-depth case study material which illuminates the impact of early aiding on the rate of acquisition of communicative and linguistic behaviours of a small group of severely and profoundly deaf infants (average better ear impairment of 101 dB) aided between 3 and 6 months of age. A comparison is made of each infant's development of gestural and vocal productions between the ages of 6 and 21 months. Data derive from video- and audio-recorded social interaction between deaf and hearing infants and their principal caregivers taken across three contexts. The effects of earlier identification, amplification and fluctuations in early auditory stimulation, on the deaf infants' acquisition of communicative, symbolic and linguistic skills are discussed.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1992

Vocal development in infants with Down syndrome and infants who are developing normally.

The development of early vocalizations was investigated with 13 infants who had Down syndrome and 27 infants who were developing normally at bimonthly intervals from 4 to 18 months of age. A perceptually based framework was used to categorize utterances according to their developmental relations with adult, well-formed, or "canonical" syllables. Over time, both groups demonstrated increased production of mature vowel and canonical consonant-vowel syllables (characterized by full vowels, consonants, and rapid, well-coordinated articulatory movements) and decreased production of less mature "quasi-vowel" and marginal syllables. Infants in both groups were also quite variable in vocal development, both within group and across time.

Child Language↗
PubMed1999

Human simulations of vocabulary learning.

The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental "learners" are adults. The items to be "acquired" in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs from a sample of maternal speech to 18-24-month-old infants. The various experiments ask about the kinds of information that will support identification of these words as they occur in mother-to-child discourse. Both the proportion correctly identified and the type of word that is identifiable changes significantly as a function of information type. We discuss these results as consistent with the incremental construction of a highly lexicalized grammar by cognitively and pragmatically sophisticated human infants, but inconsistent with a procedure in which lexical acquisition is independent of and antecedent to syntax acquisition.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Language acquisition in the absence of explicit negative evidence: how important is starting small?

It is commonly assumed that innate linguistic constraints are necessary to learn a natural language, based on the apparent lack of explicit negative evidence provided to children and on Gold's proof that, under assumptions of virtually arbitrary positive presentation, most interesting classes of languages are not learnable. However, Gold's results do not apply under the rather common assumption that language presentation may be modeled as a stochastic process. Indeed, Elman (Elman, J.L., 1993. Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small. Cognition 48, 71-99) demonstrated that a simple recurrent connectionist network could learn an artificial grammar with some of the complexities of English, including embedded clauses, based on performing a word prediction task within a stochastic environment. However, the network was successful only when either embedded sentences were initially withheld and only later introduced gradually, or when the network itself was given initially limited memory which only gradually improved. This finding has been taken as support for Newport's 'less is more' proposal, that child language acquisition may be aided rather than hindered by limited cognitive resources. The current article reports on connectionist simulations which indicate, to the contrary, that starting with simplified inputs or limited memory is not necessary in training recurrent networks to learn pseudonatural languages; in fact, such restrictions hinder acquisition as the languages are made more English-like by the introduction of semantic as well as syntactic constraints. We suggest that, under a statistical model of the language environment, Gold's theorem and the possible lack of explicit negative evidence do not implicate innate, linguistic-specific mechanisms. Furthermore, our simulations indicate that special teaching methods or maturational constraints may be unnecessary in learning the structure of natural language.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed2006

Association between differentiated processing of syllables and comprehension of grammatical morphology in children with Down syndrome.

Our purpose in this exploratory investigation was to examine the relationship between degree of impairment in grammatical morpheme comprehension and event-related potential measures of differentiated processing of speech syllables in 10 children with Down syndrome. Results strongly support the hypothesized association. Graphs of the association indicate that children with less impaired grammatical comprehension had greater amplitude differences in event-related potentials to contrast of syllables within preselected poststimulus latency ranges. The theoretical and clinical ramifications of these results are discussed.

Cerebral Cortex↗
PubMed1993

Effects of otitis media on child development.

Otitis media is one of the most common diseases of childhood, and the broad continuum of this disease ranges from asymptomatic middle ear effusion to recurring or persistent infection. In spite of many modalities of successful treatment, there remains a large number of children with chronic otitis media after antibiotic management and even in some persistent cases after surgical management with ventilation and tube insertion. This report attempts to concisely review the studies on the effect of otitis media on childhood development.

Child↗
PubMed1994

Therapy at home: Vygotskian perspectives on parental involvement.

In this article a case study is used to demonstrate the contributions of parents to the diagnostic and intervention process in home-based therapy. Two assumptions of Vygotskian theory form the bases for this conceptualization: (1) that individual mental functioning has social origins, and (2) that individuals appropriate their ways of talking and thinking from the sociocultural routines and practices in which they are embedded. Given these assumptions, the role of the parent is presented as essential to assessment and treatment because the talk of the child is jointly constructed with them and within home activities. The case study functions as an example of how parents are instrumental to our therapeutic work.

Child Development↗