ABSTRACT:Objective: The goal of the study was to compare the accuracy and diagnostic power of a parent report measure and direct language assessment for early identification of children with language delay. Method: The parent language report and direct language measures were compared for 47 typically developing toddlers and 70 late-talking toddlers aged 24 to 26 months. One year later, language abilities of 102 of the 117 children were reassessed. Results: The concurrent validity of the parent report was high both for judging language skills and for identifying language delay. No evidence was found of differences in the rating accuracy of mothers with different educational levels. Language abilities 1 year later were predicted better with direct language measurement than with the parent report. However, there were no differences between the accuracy of the parent report and individual language assessment concerning the prediction of language delay at age 3. Conclusion:The results suggest that the parent language report is a valid and efficient tool for assessing productive language abilities and judging expressive language delay in 2-year-old toddlers. The measurement characteristics of the parent report are comparable with those of direct language measures. (J Dev Behav Pediatr 29:34-41, 2008) Index Terms: late talkers, early identification, parent report, concurrent and predictive validity

Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.

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Short-term storage of auditory information is thought to be a precondition for cognitive development, and deficits in short-term memory are believed to underlie learning disabilities and specific language disorders. We examined the development of the duration of auditory sensory memory in normally developing children between the ages of 2 and 6 years. To probe the lifetime of auditory sensory memory we elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of the late auditory evoked potential, with tone stimuli of two different frequencies presented with various interstimulus intervals between 500 and 5,000 ms. Our findings suggest that memory traces for tone characteristics have a duration of 1-2 s in 2- and 3-year-old children, more than 2 s in 4-year-olds and 3-5 s in 6-year-olds. The results provide insights into the maturational processes involved in auditory sensory memory during the sensitive period of cognitive development.

Background Recent research has shown that socio‐emotional and language competencies are positively associated with each other. However, few studies have explored these associations for the second language competencies (L2) of young dual language learners (DLLs). Aims This longitudinal study investigated possible bidirectional associations between L2 language (expressive and receptive vocabulary) and socio‐emotional competencies among preschool DLLs. Sample The participants were 216 German DLLs (MT1 = 52.67 months; SD = 9.54; 53% girls) who were recruited from 19 preschools. Method L2 skills were assessed at three time points over the course of one year using standardized tests for expressive and receptive vocabulary. Children’s teachers rated their socio‐emotional strengths and behaviour concerns. Cross‐lagged panel analyses were used to examine the temporal interplay and longitudinal directionality of effects controlling for children’s age, sex, type of language acquisition (sequential vs. simultaneous), and socio‐economic status. Results Vocabulary skills and socio‐emotional skills were positively correlated with one another at each time point, such that children with better language proficiency were rated by their teachers as children with higher levels of socio‐emotional competence. Moreover, our results provided support for an effect of early socio‐emotional skills (T1) on the relative increase in L2 vocabulary skills (T2 & T3), particularly for expressive vocabulary. However, our results did not demonstrate a statistically significant effect of better L2 language skills on the relative change in socio‐emotional competencies. Conclusion Our results suggest unidirectional longitudinal relations between the socio‐emotional and L2 skills, signifying the role of socio‐emotional skills for the vocabulary development of DLLs.