What is ‘word understanding’ for the parent of a one-year-old? Matching the difficulty of a lexical comprehension task to parental CDI report

Abstract

Is parental report of comprehension valid for individual words? If so, how well must an infant know a word before their parents will report it as 'understood'? We report an experiment in which parental report predicts infant performance in a referent identification task at 1 ; 6. Unlike in previous research of this kind (i.e. Houston-Price, Mather & Sakkalou, 2007), infants saw items only once, and image pairs were taxonomic sisters. The match between parental report and infant behaviour provides evidence of the item-level accuracy of both measures of lexical comprehension, and informs our understanding of how British parents interpret standardized Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs).

A methodological investigation of the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm: Methods of analyses, picture selection and data rejection criteria

“…In word recognition tasks, with or without a mispronunciation element, words are selected so that they are likely to be known a priori by all participants according to standardized norms (thus reducing considerably the number of potential stimuli, re. Ramon-Casas et al, 2009;Swingley et al, 1999), or by at least 50% of children of the corresponding age (e.g., Styles & Plunkett, 2008). Then, some authors further filter the data by analyzing only trials where parents report the words as known by the child (e.g., Mani & Plunkett, 2011b).…”

“…Finally, data cleaning is achieved by excluding participants not contributing to all experimental conditions (Fernald et al, 2006; second analysis in Styles & Plunkett, 2008), or whose data points fall outside normality (Fernald et al, 2006; see also Mani & Plunkett, 2007). Although all these types of pre-processing or filtering allow for cleaner datasets, comparability across experiments would benefit from consistent practice, preferably on the measures that are the most conservative.…”

“…Falling on an agreement on exclusion criteria or on the best-suited age-specific time window would be desirable. Indeed, some analyses only include trials where the child is looking at a picture (final analysis in Fernald et al, 1998), while others reject children not contributing to all conditions (e.g., Fernald et al, 2006; second analysis in Styles & Plunkett, 2008), set a minimum looking time (e.g., Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Ballem & Plunkett, 2005) or only include trials were both pictures are fixated (Mani & Plunkett, 2007.…”

“…IPL studies in the literature have presented a whole range of different dependent variables (see Table 1), and included pre-naming as a factor (Mani & Plunkett, 2007;Styles & Plunkett, 2008) or as a salience score (Swingley & Aslin, 2007;White & Morgan, 2008). In the first case, the two resulting independent variables are naming (pre-vs. post-naming) and pronunciation (correct vs. incorrect), and in the second case only pronunciation.…”

Relations between nonverbal cognitive ability and spoken language development : implications for deaf toddlers who use cochlear implants.

“…The reliability and validity of the CDls were demonstrated in numerous early studies (Camaioni, Caselli, Longobardi, & Volterra, 1991;Dale, 1991;Dale, Bates, Reznick, & Morisset, 1989;Jackson-Maldonado, ThaI, Marchman, Bates, & Gutierrez-Clellen, 1993; Q'Hanlon, Washkevich, & ThaL 1991) and parents have been generally found to be good judges of whether their child understands and/or produces a given word (Fenson et aI., 2006;Ring & Fenson, 2000;Styles & Plunkett, 2009 The primary limit ofthe CDIs is that they cannot distinguish between imitations and spontaneous speech, nor the range of contexts in which particular words are used.…”