Volubility as a mediator in the associations between conversational language measures and child temperament

Abstract

Background Despite support for the use of conversational language measures, concerns remain regarding the extent to which they may be confounded with aspects of child temperament, extraversion in particular. Aims This study of 161 twins from the Western Reserve Reading Project (WRRP) examined the associations between children’s conversational language use and three key aspects of child temperament: Surgency (i.e., introversion/extraversion), Effortful Control (i.e., attention and task persistence), and Negative Affectivity (e.g., fear, anger, sadness). Child biological sex was considered as a possible moderating factor. Methods & Procedures Correlational analyses were conducted between aspects of temperament during early school-age years (i.e., 7 to 8 yrs), as measured by the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire-Short Form (CBQ; Putnam & Rothbart, 2006), and six different measures of children’s conversational language use: total number of complete and intelligible utterances (TCICU), number of total words (NTW), mean length of utterance (MLU), total number of conjunctions (TNC), number of different words (NDW), and measure D (i.e., a measure of lexical diversity). Values for NTW, TNC, and NDW were derived both on the entire sample and on the first 100 C-units. Correlations between language and temperament were compared between girls and boys using the Fisher r-to-z transformation to examine the significance of potential moderating effects. Outcomes & Results Children’s reported variability in Effortful Control did not correlate significantly with any of the child language measures. In contrast, children’s Negative Affectivity and Surgency tended to demonstrate positive, albeit modest, correlations with those conversational language measures that were derived from the sample as a whole, rather than from a standardized number of utterances. MLU, as well as measures of NDW and NTW derived from standardized sample lengths of 100 C-units, did not correlate with any measure of child temperament. TNC demonstrated an unexpected negative correlation with child Surgency when it was derived from a standardized number of C-units but not when derived from the entire sample length. Child biological sex did not moderate the significant associations between language and temperament measures. Conclusions & Implications Overall, measures that control for volubility did not correlate significantly with child temperament; however, measures that reflected volubility tended to correlate weakly with some aspects of temperament, particularly Surgency. Results provide a degree of discriminant evidence for the validity of MLU and measures of type (i.e., NDW) and token use (i.e., NTW) when derived from a standardized number of utterances.

Impact of Prematurity on Language Skills at School Age

“…At HV3 its loading for the semantic factor was negative, a rather startling result for a supposed indicator of semantic skill. Other researchers have reported a smaller effect size for D than for other measures (Owen & Leonard, 2002;DeThorne et al, 2008); similar results were obtained in two other recent studies of the WRRP data (DeThorne, Petrill, Schatschneider, & Cutting, 2010;DeThorne, Deater-Deckard, Mahurin-Smith, & Petrill, under review), each of which used independently derived values for D. The difficulty, then, is unlikely to be faulty calculation; perhaps it is that the serial type-token ratios from which D is calculated are no more effective than aggregate TTRs in distinguishing between typical and atypical language use (Watkins, Kelly, Harbers, & Hollis, 1995). If a single TTR is not useful in discriminating between typical and impaired language abilities, it is unsurprising that an agglomeration of TTRs is no more so.…”

Sample Length Affects the Reliability of Language Sample Measures in 3-Year-Olds: Evidence From Parent-Elicited Conversational Samples

“…Thus, one can argue that the decrease of NDW/m with sample length in the current study may simply reflect the nature of language production and cannot be used as evidence to suggest that NDW/m is unreliable in shorter samples. To better reflect the reliability of NDW in shorter samples, different methods of adjusting for sample length, other than adjusting the samples by minutes, could be a worthwhile research pursuit (e.g., DeThorne, DeaterDeckard, Mahurin-Smith, Coletto, & Petrill, 2011;McKee, Malvern, & Richards, 2000). Given that NDW/m decreased with sample length in the present study, an ensuing question is whether 10-min conversational samples are appropriate for documenting lexical skills in 3-year-olds.…”

The Predictive Value of Head Circumference Growth during the First Year of Life on Early Child Traits

“…Although socio-emotional adjustment in early childhood can be conceptualized in several ways, studies have often focused on the assessment of temperament. Temperament core dimensions includes negative affect, surgency/extraversion and effortful control which, respectively, have been shown to confer risk for behavioral problems and affective disorders 19 – 21 , communication development and children’s conversational skills 22 , 23 , and increased risk for the development of externalizing disorders and problems related to attention 19 , 24 , 25 . Finally, the literature on early childhood development has also consistently identified poor cognitive and motor abilities in young children as a shared risk factor in a plethora of neurodevelopmental disorders 26 – 28 .…”