The home literacy environment is a well-established predictor of children’s language and literacy development. We investigated whether formal, informal, and indirect measures of the home literacy environment predict children’s reading and language skills once maternal language abilities are taken into account. Data come from a longitudinal study of children at high risk of dyslexia (N = 251) followed from preschool years. Latent factors describing maternal language were significant predictors of storybook exposure but not of direct literacy instruction. Maternal language and phonological skills respectively predicted children’s language and reading/spelling skills. However, after accounting for variations in maternal language, storybook exposure was not a significant predictor of children’s outcomes. In contrast, direct literacy instruction remained a predictor of children’s reading/spelling skills. We argue that the relationship between early informal home literacy activities and children’s language and reading skills is largely accounted for by maternal skills and may reflect genetic influences.

This study examined executive functioning and reading achievement in 106 6- to 8-year-old Brazilian children from a range of social backgrounds of whom approximately half lived below the poverty line. A particular focus was to explore the executive function profile of children whose classroom reading performance was judged below standard by their teachers and who were matched to controls on chronological age, sex, school type (private or public), domicile (Salvador/BA or São Paulo/SP) and socioeconomic status. Children completed a battery of 12 executive function tasks that were conceptual tapping cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibition and selective attention. Each executive function domain was assessed by several tasks. Principal component analysis extracted four factors that were labeled “Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility,” “Interference Suppression,” “Selective Attention,” and “Response Inhibition.” Individual differences in executive functioning components made differential contributions to early reading achievement. The Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility factor emerged as the best predictor of reading. Group comparisons on computed factor scores showed that struggling readers displayed limitations in Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility, but not in other executive function components, compared to more skilled readers. These results validate the account that working memory capacity provides a crucial building block for the development of early literacy skills and extends it to a population of early readers of Portuguese from Brazil. The study suggests that deficits in working memory/cognitive flexibility might represent one contributing factor to reading difficulties in early readers. This might have important implications for how educators might intervene with children at risk of academic under achievement.

The study indicates that linguistic and cognitive assessments for language-minority children require careful choice among measures to ensure valid results. Implications for testing culturally and linguistically diverse children are discussed.

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual children with SLI. Studying bilinguals with SLI is important, especially in the light of increasing evidence that bilingualism can bring advantages in certain domains of executive functioning. Aims: To determine whether executive functioning represents an area of difficulty for bilingual language-minority children with SLI and, if so, which specific executive processes are affected. Methods & Procedures:This cross-cultural research was conducted with bilingual children from Luxembourg and monolingual children from Portugal who all had Portuguese as their first language. The data from 81 eight-year-olds from the following three groups were analysed: (1) 15 Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg with an SLI diagnosis; (2) 33 typically developing Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg; and (3) 33 typically developing Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Portugal. Groups were matched on first language, ethnicity, chronological age and socioeconomic status, and they did not differ in nonverbal intelligence. Children completed a battery of tests tapping: expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, verbal and visuospatial working memory, selective attention and interference suppression. Outcomes & Results:The bilingual SLI group performed equally well compared with their typically developing peers on measures of visuospatial working memory, but had lower scores than both control groups on tasks of verbal working memory. On measures of selective attention and interference suppression, typically developing children who were bilingual outperformed their monolingual counterparts. For selective attention, performance of the bilingual SLI group did not differ significantly from the controls. For interference suppression the bilingual SLI group performed significantly less well than typically developing bilinguals but not monolinguals. Conclusions & Implications:This research provides further support to the position that SLI is not a language-specific disorder. The study indicates that although bilingual children with SLI do not demonstrate the same advantages in selective attention and interference suppression as typically developing bilinguals, they do not lag behind typically developing monolinguals in these domains of executive functioning. This finding raises the possibility that bilingualism might represent a protective factor against some of the cognitive limitations that are associated with SLI in monolinguals.

The findings corroborate the view that grammatical words constitute a challenge for SLI children, since they presented many errors that suggest difficulties in the domain of prepositions. The results also emphasized, for the SLI group, deficits in the expressive language.

RESUMOObjetivo: Analisar o desempenho longitudinal de crianças com Alterações Específicas no Desenvolvimento da Linguagem (AEDL) em uma prova de Pragmática a fim de observar o desenvolvimento da competência comunicativa ao longo do processo terapêutico. Métodos: Participaram desta pesquisa 56 crianças de ambos os sexos, com idades entre 1;10 (anos;meses) a 5;11 na primeira avaliação. Todos os sujeitos foram diagnosticados com AEDL e estavam/estiveram em terapia fonoaudiológica por pelo menos dois anos ou receberam alta antes deste período. As provas de Pragmática que faziam parte das avaliações anuais dos pacientes foram analisadas e pontuadas de 0 a 4 (pior ao melhor desempenho, respectivamente) com base em critérios de gravidade. Os resultados foram tratados estatisticamente (pd"0,05; ANOVA, Tukey-T, Pearson). Resultados: A idade das crianças com AEDL no momento do ingresso no serviço não foi uma variável relevante para determinar seus desempenhos na primeira avaliação de Pragmática, exceto para a idade de um ano (p=0,02), nem para predizer o tempo de terapia necessário para que eles normalizassem suas habilidades pragmáticas (p=0,72). As crianças que atingiram os critérios de normalidade para a prova (64,3%) apresentaram um desempenho inicial melhor do que os sujeitos que não normalizaram seus desempenhos até o momento da coleta (p=0,01). Finalmente, enquanto o meio comunicativo foi o parâmetro que mais melhorou após terapia fonoaudiológica, o número de atos por minuto foi a variável cujo prejuízo mostrou-se mais persistente. Conclusão: O desempenho inicial das crianças com AEDL foi a variável que melhor predisse a normalização das habilidades pragmáticas dos sujeitos (64,3%), após terapia fonoaudiológica. Descritores: Desenvolvimento da linguagem; Transtornos do desenvolvimento da linguagem/fisiopatologia; Transtornos do desenvolvimento da linguagem/terapia; Comportamento verbal; Comunicação; Testes de linguagem

The present study investigated the psychometric properties of the Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) test in a sample of preschoolers from Brazil ( n = 582; age: mean = 57 months, SD = 7 months; 46% female). We investigated the plausibility of unidimensionality of the items (confirmatory factor analysis) and differential item functioning (DIF) for sex and age (multiple indicators multiple causes method). We tested four unidimensional models and the one with the best-fit index was a reduced form of the Raven's CPM. The DIF analysis was carried out with the reduced form of the test. A few items presented DIF (two for sex and one for age), confirming that the Raven's CPM items are mostly measurement invariant. There was no effect of sex on the general factor, but increasing age was associated with higher values of the g factor. Future research should indicate if the reduced form is suitable for evaluating the general ability of preschoolers.

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