Input To Children Research Articles

Exploring children's preferences for graphic symbols to represent pain‐related words

AbstractChildren who are hospitalized may sometimes not be able to communicate verbally to self‐report their pain or other symptoms due to medical conditions, medical interventions, or communication difficulties. As such, these children may need other means, such as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies, in this case, graphic symbols, to express their pain‐related experiences and receive applicable treatment. Choosing suitable graphic symbols to represent pain‐related words contributes to the effective use and implementation of visual support. This study explored the preferences of 6.0–9.11‐year‐old (years; months) children with typical development regarding graphic symbols to represent pain‐related words. These symbols were selected from two commonly used and widespread symbol resources: Picture Communication Symbols (PCS®) and Aragonese Portal of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ARASAAC) symbols. A descriptive, quantitative study design was employed, including a total of 30 typically developed South African children. Data were collected by means of an electronic questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Probability values were determined and predictions, as well as inferences, were implemented. The results showed that the children preferred ARASAAC symbols to represent most pain‐related words (p < 0.001). It is important to consider stakeholders' (in this case, children's) input on their preferences in designing communication support to enable participation during the clinical decision‐making process.

Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using LENA and the ACLEW pipeline.

Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on derived metrics like adult word count (AWC) and child vocalization counts (CVC), which have also more recently been derived using an open-source alternative, the ACLEW pipeline. Yet, there is relatively little work assessing the reliability of long-form metrics in terms of the stability of individual differences across time. Filling this gap, we analyzed eight spoken-language datasets: four from North American English-learning infants, and one each from British English-, French-, American English-/Spanish-, and Quechua-/Spanish-learning infants. The audio data were analyzed using two types of processing software: LENA and the ACLEW open-source pipeline. When all corpora were included, we found relatively low to moderate reliability (across multiple recordings, intraclass correlation coefficient attributed to the child identity [Child ICC], was < 50% for most metrics). There were few differences between the two pipelines. Exploratory analyses suggested some differences as a function of child age and corpora. These findings suggest that, while reliability is likely sufficient for various group-level analyses, caution is needed when using either LENA or ACLEW tools to study individual variation. We also encourage improvement of extant tools, specifically targeting accurate measurement of individual variation.

Child-directed speech in a large sample of U.S. mothers with low income.

Research on early language input and socioeconomic status typically relies on correlations in small convenience samples. Using data from Baby's First Years, this paper assesses the causal impact of monthly, unconditional cash transfers on child-directed speech and child vocalizations among a large, racially diverse sample of low-income U.S. mothers and their 1-year-olds (N = 563; 48% girls; 2019-2020). The monthly, unconditional cash transfers did not impact mothers' child-directed speech during a 10-min at-home play session (effect sizes range from -.08 to .02), though there was wide variability within this sample. Future work will assess the impact of the continued cash transfer on children's language input and development over time.

Linking acoustic variability in the infants' input to their early word production.

Exposure to talker variability shapes how learning unfolds in the lab, and occurs in the everyday speech infants hear in daily life. Here, we asked whether aspects of talker variability in speech input are also linked to the onset of word production. We further asked whether these effects were redundant with effects of speech register (i.e.,whether speech input was adult- vs.child-directed). To do so, we first extracted a set of highly common nouns from a longitudinal corpus of home recordings from North-American English-learning infants. We then used the acoustic variability in how these tokens were said to predict when the children first produced these same nouns. We found that in addition to frequency, variability in how words sound in 6-17 month's input predicted when children first said these words. Furthermore, while the proportion of child-directed speech also predicted the month of first production, it did so alongside measurements of acoustic variability in children's real-world input. Together, these results add to a growing body of literature suggesting that variability in how words sound in the input is linked to learning both in the lab and in dailylife. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Talker variability shapes learning in the lab and exists in everyday speech; we asked whether it predicts word learning in the real world. Acoustic measurements of early words in infants' input (and their frequency) predicted when infants first said those same words. Speech register also predicted when infants said words, alongside effects of talker variability. Our results provide a deeper understanding of how sources of variability inherent to children's input connect to their learning and development.

Are minimally verbal autistic children's modality and form of communication associated with parent responsivity?

Prior work examined how minimally verbal (MV) children with autism used their gestural communication during social interactions. However, interactions are exchanges between social partners. Examining parent-child social interactions is critically important given the influence of parent responsivity on children's communicative development. Specifically, parent responses that are semantically contingent to the child's communication plays an important role in further shaping children's language learning. This study examines whether MV autistic children's (N = 47; 48-95 months; 10 females) modality and form of communication are associated with parent responsivity during an in-home parent-child interaction (PCI). The PCI was collected using natural language sampling methods and coded for child modality and form of communication and parent responses. Findings from Kruskal-Wallis H tests revealed that there was no significant difference in parent semantically contingent responses based on child communication modality (spoken language, gesture, gesture-speech combinations, and AAC) and form of communication (precise vs. imprecise). Findings highlight the importance of examining multiple modalities and forms of communication in MV children with autism to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of their communication abilities; and underscore the inclusion of interactionist models of communication to examine children's input on parent responses in further shaping language learning experiences.

When is a word in good company for learning?

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's real-world language input have yielded conflicting results, with some influential findings suggesting an advantage for words that keep a diverse company of other words, and others suggesting the opposite. Here, we sought to triangulate the source of this conflict, comparing different measures of diversity and approaches to controlling for correlated effects of word frequency across multiple languages. The results were striking: while different diversity measures on their own yielded conflicting results, once nonlinear relationships with word frequency were controlled, we found convergent evidence that contextual consistency supports early word learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: The words children learn occur in a sea of other words. The company words keep ranges from highly variable to highly consistent and circumscribed. Prior findings conflict over whether variability versus consistency helps early word learning. Accounting for correlated effects of word frequency resolved the conflict across multiple languages. Results reveal convergent evidence that consistency helps early word learning.

Grounded language acquisition through the eyes and ears of a single child.

Starting around 6 to 9 months of age, children begin acquiring their first words, linking spoken words to their visual counterparts. How much of this knowledge is learnable from sensory input with relatively generic learning mechanisms, and how much requires stronger inductive biases? Using longitudinal head-mounted camera recordings from one child aged 6 to 25 months, we trained a relatively generic neural network on 61 hours of correlated visual-linguistic data streams, learning feature-based representations and cross-modal associations. Our model acquires many word-referent mappings present in the child's everyday experience, enables zero-shot generalization to new visual referents, and aligns its visual and linguistic conceptual systems. These results show how critical aspects of grounded word meaning are learnable through joint representation and associative learning from one child's input.

Language acquisition in a post-pandemic context: the impact of measures against COVID-19 on early language development.

Language acquisition is influenced by the quality and quantity of input that language learners receive. In particular, early language development has been said to rely on the acoustic speech stream, as well as on language-related visual information, such as the cues provided by the mouth of interlocutors. Furthermore, children's expressive language skills are also influenced by the variability of interlocutors that provided the input. The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore the way these input factors affect language development. On the one hand, the pervasive use of masks diminishes the quality of speech, while it also reduces visual cues to language. On the other hand, lockdowns and restrictions regarding social gatherings have considerably limited the amount of interlocutor variability in children's input. The present study aims at analyzing the effects of the pandemic measures against COVID-19 on early language development. To this end, 41 children born in 2019 and 2020 were compared with 41 children born before 2012 using the Catalan adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs). Results do not show significant differences in vocabulary between pre- and post-Covid children, although there is a tendency for children with lower vocabulary levels to be in the post-Covid group. Furthermore, a relationship was found between interlocutor variability and participants' vocabulary, indicating that those participants with fewer opportunities for socio-communicative diversity showed lower expressive vocabulary scores. These results reinforce other recent findings regarding input factors and their impact on early language learning.

COVID-19 and bilingual children's home language environment: Digital media, socioeconomic status, and language status.

Input is considered crucial in bilingual children's language development. This is especially true for bilingual children's mother tongue language learning given its common reduction in input opportunities due to the dominance of one language within society, as seen in countries and regions from Wales to Singapore. Previous studies tend to focus on the quantity and quality of conventional active communication and resources (e.g., speaking and reading with parents) on bilingual children's language development, and substantially, fewer studies have explored this topic from the perspective of digital media. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated the critical role of digital media in various aspects of life, including bilingual children's home language environment. Thus, to holistically understand bilingual children's daily language input patterns, it is imperative to explore both their conventional and digital media input resources. The current study focuses on English-Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and would like to explore (1) whether their conventional and digital media language environments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) whether the societal status of a language and familial socioeconomic status (SES) would affect bilingual children's conventional and digital media input. Survey data from 162 parents of English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers (3 to 6 years old) were used to explore the two research questions. Two online parental questionnaires were employed for data collection. One-way repeated-measures MANOVA and path models were used to address the questions. The results indicated that input patterns from nuclear family members had not been affected by COVID-19; however, the amount and frequency of conventional and digital media materials and activities increased significantly since COVID-19. Higher-SES families possessed more conventional materials and conducted conventional activities more often, while lower-SES families possessed more digital media materials. Both conventional and digital media materials and activities were richer in English than in Mandarin. Higher-SES families perceived digital media usage for learning to be of less importance than lower-SES families. The implications for early bilingual learning following COVID-19 are discussed.

Finding Structure in One Child's Linguistic Experience.

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and analyze the linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman'sseminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmentalexperience.

Mixed-Language Input and Infant Volubility: Friend or Foe?

Language mixing is a common feature of many bilingually-raised children's input. Yet how it is related to their language development remains an open question. The current study investigated mixed-language input indexed by observed (30-second segment) counts and proportions in day-long recordings as well as parent-reported scores, in relation to infant vocal activeness (i.e., volubility) when infants were 10 and 18 months old. Results suggested infants who received a higher score or proportion of mixed input in one-on-one social contexts were less voluble. However, within contexts involving language mixing, infants who heard more words were also the ones who produced more vocalizations. These divergent associations between mixed input and infant vocal development point for a need to better understand the causal factors that drive these associations.

Learning unaccusativity: Evidence for split intransitivity in child Spanish

We examine four features of unaccusativity in child-directed and child Spanish to determine what cues children might use to distinguish unaccusative and unergative verbs. Two are cross-linguistic lexico-semantic features: Subjects of unaccusatives are patients so we expect more inanimate subjects with unaccusatives; and unaccusatives tend to have an endpoint, hence may occur more frequently with perfective aspect. The other two are language-specific morphosyntactic features: VS order is grammatical with unaccusatives but not unergatives, and many unaccusative verbs allow/require the anticausative se clitic. We find all four features robustly in children's input and that even 1-2-year-olds show discriminate use of them.

Vocal input and output among infants in a multilingual context: Evidence from long-form recordings in Vanuatu.

What are the vocal experiences of children growing up on Malakula island, Vanuatu, where multilingualism is the norm? Long-form audio-recordings captured spontaneous speech behavior by, and around, 38 children (5-33 months, 23 girls) from 11 villages. Automated analyses revealed most children's vocal input came from female adults and other children's voices, with small contributions from male adult voices. The greatest changes with age involved an increase in the input vocalizations from other children. Total input (collapsing across child-directed and overheard speech, and across languages) was ∼11 min per hour, which was at least 5 min (31%) lower than that found in other populations studied using comparable methods in previous literature, as well as in archival American data analyzed with the same algorithm. In contrast, children's own vocalization counts were two to four times higher than previous reports for North-American English-learning monolingual infants at matched ages, and comparable to estimates from archival American data, consistent with a resilient language-learning cognitive system for this aspect of vocal development. The strongest association between input and output was with vocalizations by other children, rather than those by adults, which is consistent with research in anthropology but less so with current theoretical trends in developmental psychology. These results invite further research in populations that are under-represented in developmental science. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Combining long-form recordings with automated analyses, we estimated infants potentially exposed to ∼2.6 languages heard ∼11 min of speech per hour. Infants' input was dominated by vocalizations from female adults and from other children, particularly for the oldest infants in our sample. The strongest association between children's own vocalization counts and input counts was with those of other children, and not those with adults. Results invite further research on individual, group, and population variability in input quantity and composition, and its potential effects on vocal development.

Utility of the Questionnaire on Children’s Processing of Sensory Input in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

In addition to difficulties with social communication and behaviour flexibility, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulty responding to sensory input. Our aim was to assess the sensitivity of the Questionnaire on Children’s Processing of Sensory Input to sensory issues experienced by children with ASD. Based on the responses of 108 parents of neurotypical children and 27 parents of children with ASD (3 to 10 years), we found that the questionnaire differentiated well between the groups. The questionnaire may be used by health, education or social services professionals and represents a novel tool for recognizing sensory processing difficulties in children. Information gained from it can help plan additional supports for children with sensory challenges.

Personalized Recommender System for Children's Book Recommendation with A Realtime Interactive Robot

In this paper, we study the personalized book recommender system in a child–robot interactive environment. Firstly, we propose a novel text search algorithm using an inverse filtering mechanism that improves the efficiency. Secondly, we propose a user interest prediction method based on the Bayesian network and a novel feedback mechanism. According to children’s fuzzy language input, the proposed method gives the predicted interests. Thirdly, the domain-specific synonym association is proposed based on word vectorization, in order to improve the understanding of user intention. Experimental results show that the proposed recommender system has an improved performance, and it can operate on embedded consumer devices with limited computational resources.

A new way to identify if variation in children's input could be developmentally meaningful: Using computational cognitive modeling to assess input across socio-economic status for syntactic islands.

While there are always differences in children's input, it is unclear how often these differences impact language development - that is, are developmentally meaningful - and why they do (or do not) do so. We describe a new approach using computational cognitive modeling that links children's input to predicted language development outcomes, and can identify if input differences are potentially developmentally meaningful. We use this approach to investigate if there is developmentally-meaningful input variation across socio-economic status (SES) with respect to the complex syntactic knowledge called syntactic islands. We focus on four island types with available data about the target linguistic behavior. Despite several measurable input differences for syntactic island input across SES, our model predicts this variation not to be developmentally meaningful: it predicts no differences in the syntactic island knowledge that can be learned from that input. We discuss implications for language development variability across SES.

Learning language in vivo

AbstractIn this article, I advocate for an enriched view of children's linguistic input, with the aim of building sustainable and tangible links between theoretical models of language development and families' everyday experiences. Children's language experiences constrain theoretical models in ways that may illuminate universal learning biases. However, more than that, these experiences provide a staggering array of test cases and demonstrate the stage‐setting effects of situational, familial, and societal context on language use and uptake. Centering on activity type as an entry point into context, I outline an approach—which I refer to as language in vivo—that draws on both big‐ and small‐data methods to generate grounded, informative, and representative descriptions of children's input. Minimally, this approach complements recent work that uses more bundled input measures. Maximally, an in vivo approach could inspire new questions, insights, and innovations to broaden the coverage and application of theoretical models to individual communities and families.

The Parent's Dilemma: Pediatric Assent in Research.

The Parent's Dilemma: Pediatric Assent in Research.

Children's participation in child protection—How do practitioners understand children's participation in practice?

AbstractChildren's participation is essential to achieve good outcomes for children involved in child protection systems. Despite this, research has consistently found children report low levels of participation, are poorly consulted and feel inadequately involved in decisions about their lives. To explore how practitioners understand children's participation, 18 in‐depth interviews were conducted with statutory child protection practitioners in Australia. The interviews explored the ways child protection practitioners understand children's participation. Our findings show practitioners conceptualize children as rights holders and believe it is essential to hear directly from children about their needs and wishes to keep them safe. Practitioners identified the importance of transparent processes and decisions. Different understanding of participation emerged, with some participants talking about children as their central focus but not discussing meaningful participation of the child. It appeared that children's participation relied largely on the views and skills of individual workers, as well as their ability to incorporate meaningful participation in limited time and in complex practice environments where children's safety is a primary concern. Systemic changes to address time barriers, training practitioners to understand and implement participatory practice, and seeking children's input into service design, will support consistent and meaningful participation.

Dampak Pola Asuh Orang Tua Terhadap Kemandirian Anak (Studi Kasus Di RA Muslimat NU 076 Jalen Ngrukem Mlarak Ponorogo)

Early childhood education (PAUD) is a level of education before basic education, which is a coaching effort aimed at children from birth to six years of age. One of the preschool institutions is Raudlatul Athfal who foster children aged 4-6 years. After the child enters that period, the child will begin to learn independently and stand alone apart from the supervision of parents or caregivers. learn to be sociable, adjust to groups and develop openness. Parents play an important role in educating children to have an independent character. In the field, the researchers found that there were students who were in charge of completing children's school assignments who were less independent, less painstaking, impatient, influenced by friends, and careless, and less able to control pocket money. For this reason, it is necessary to increase the child's independence through the implementation of parenting styles. The parenting style applied to children in RA Muslimat NU 076 is democratic parenting. The care includes not imposing the will on the child, not giving full freedom to the child, and considering every child's decision, providing solutions and input to the child, the condition of independence at RA Muslimat NU 076 Jalen Ngrukem Mlarak Ponorogo has been scheduled every day, parents have also striving for children's independence while at home, therefore most children have good independence. The impact of parenting on children's independence, that most parents have implemented democratic parenting for children so that children's independence in RA Muslimat NU 076 Jalen Ngrukem Mlarak Ponorogo is good.