Language development in rural and urban Russian-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder

Abstract

Using a newly developed Assessment of the Development of Russian Language (ORRIA), we investigated differences in language development between rural vs. urban Russian-speaking children (n = 100 with a mean age of 6.75) subdivided into groups with and without developmental language disorders. Using classical test theory and item response theory approaches, we found that while ORRIA displayed overall satisfactory psychometric properties, several of its items showed differential item functioning favoring rural children, and several others favoring urban children. After the removal of these items, rural children significantly underperformed on ORRIA compared to urban children. The urbanization factor did not significantly interact with language group. We discuss the latter finding in the context of the multiple additive risk factors for language development and emphasize the need for future studies of the mechanisms that underlie these influences and the implications of these findings for our understanding of the etiological architecture of children's language development.

Measurement of expressive vocabulary in school-age children: Development and application of the Kilifi Naming Test (KNT)

“…Although rural areas are likely to be characterized by limited access to resources and services (Greenfield, 2009), which in turn has an indirect negative impact on children's language scores, in the current study, children in rural areas of the district performed better than their counterparts in urban areas. Our findings are in contrast with other studies that have reported overall better performance among children living in urban areas (Kornilova et al, 2017;Schady et al, 2015;Vogt et al, 2015). These findings may be attributed to the likelihood that the drawings on the KNT represented objects that were more familiar to children in rural areas than those living in urban areas.…”

Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals: Disentangling the profiles

“…All children were monolingual speakers of Russian and had been independently diagnosed for DLD (in Russian, obščee nedorazvitie reči II-III urovnja ) based on a clinical evaluation by a multidisciplinary committee consisting of a speech pathologist, a psychiatrist, a neurologist, a pediatrician, and a clinical psychologist (cf. Kornilov et al, 2016). For privacy reasons we were not granted access to the diagnostic results.…”

Cohesion of Cortical Language Networks During Word Processing Is Predicted by a Common Polymorphism in the SETBP1 Gene

“…Of these, twenty‐three met criteria for DLD (age ranged from 7.33 to 15.25, M = 10.12, SD = 2.40; sixteen boys) and sixteen were classified as typically developing (TD; age ranged from 7.17 to 15.83, M = 11.14, SD = 2.18; seven boys). The language status classification was based on a set of expressive and receptive language measures obtained using a comprehensive standardized language development test in conjunction with a language sample analysis (see Kornilov et al., 2014, 2015, 2016; Rakhlin et al., 2013, for detailed descriptions). All children demonstrated normal hearing acuity by passing a bilateral hearing screening at 25 dB (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz).…”

“…The narratives were analyzed and assigned scores or ratings (depending on the measure) for articulation quality, syntactic complexity, grammatical well‐formedness, semantic quality, and narrative structure (Rakhlin et al., 2013). The second was a standardized test developed to assess language development in Russian, which was previously shown to have psychometric properties (ORRIA; Kornilov et al., 2016), comparable to such established instruments as the clinical evaluation of language fundamentals (CELF) (Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 1995), test of language development (TOLD) (Newcomer & Hammill, 1982), and comprehensive assessment of spoken language (CASL) (Carrow‐Woolfolk, 1999). ORRIA is aimed at assessing a child's language development in the areas of morphology, syntax, compositional semantics, and lexicon in both receptive and expressive domains.…”

“…The main focus for the association analysis was on rs8085464 (chr18:42358137; hg19; G > A, with G being the ancestral/major allele; the derived/minor A allele frequency in the sample was 29%). This SNP (the most common type of genetic variation between individuals) was chosen because it was the only SNP from the set of variants in the gene of interest ( SETBP1 ) that had previously demonstrated a statistically significant ( p = .0357) association with a quantitative phenotype of syntactic complexity, a major facet of DLD in the population of interest (Kornilov et al., 2016). The two genotype groups (the two groups of participants based on the presence of ancestral vs. derived, or G vs. A, rs8085464 allele) did not differ in either number of analyzed epochs t (37) = .28, p = .783, or signal to noise ratio for EEG data estimated for the Cz electrode, t( 37) = −1.72, p = .101.…”