Oral Language Abilities Research Articles

Investigating the effect of multimodality and sentiments on speaking assessments: a facial emotional analysis.

This quasi-experimental study aimed to determine the relationship between (i) oral language ability and emotions represented by facial emotions, and (ii) modality of assessment (audios versus videos) and sentiments embedded in each modality. Sixty university students watched and/or listened to four selected audio-visual stimuli and orally answered follow-up comprehension questions. One stimulus was designed to evoke happiness while the other, sadness. Participants' facial emotions during the answering were measured using the FaceReader technology. In addition, four trained raters assessed the responses of the participants. An analysis of the FaceReader data showed that there were significant main and interaction effects of sentiment and modality on participants' facial emotional expression. Notably, there was a significant difference in the amount of facial emotions evoked by (i) the happy vs. sad sentiment videos and (ii) video vs. audio modalities. In contrast, sentiments embedded in the stimuli and modalities had no significant effect on the measured speaking performance of the participants. Nevertheless, we found a number of significant correlations between the participants' test scores and some of their facial emotions evoked by the stimuli. Implications of these findings for the assessment of oral communication are discussed.

Oral Language Abilities in Children with Dyslexia and Poor Comprehension in Grades 3–6

Objectives: This study investigated receptive vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills of children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children in grade 3 to 6. Methods: A total of 45 children with dyslexia, poor comprehension, and typically developing children participated. In order to qualify for each group, children with dyslexia scored below 85 on the word decoding test, and poor comprehenders scored below 85 on the reading comprehension, but scored above 90 on decoding test. Typically developing children scored a standard score of 90 on both decoding and reading comprehension. All children were administered a receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence repetition, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness tasks. Results: The results showed that there were significant differences in all language tasks. Poor comprehenders scored the lowest on all tasks, followed by children with dyslexia. In the results receptive vocabulary task, there were differences between all three groups; and poor comprehenders performed lower than children with dyslexia and typically developing children on sentence comprehension. In the sentence repetition task, children with poor reading comprehension and dyslexia showed lower performance than typically developing children. Additionally, there were only differences between poor comprehenders and typically developing children in the morphological and syntactic awareness tasks. Conclusion: Poor comprehenders showed difficulties in vocabulary and morphosyntax, and children with dyslexia exhibited weakness of vocabulary and sentence repetitions that require linguistic knowledge and phonological memory. Their weakness of oral language may negatively influence reading development.

Spanish and English Oral Language Growth Rates of Bilingual Preschoolers: The Effect of Language of Instruction

AbstractStudying the oral language growth of Spanish‐speaking preschoolers in the United States is increasingly important given the critical role early language development plays in reading outcomes. In this article, we report on the Spanish and English growth trajectories observed in 124 bilingual preschoolers collected over 2 years in 36 classrooms across 5 states and the associations of growth in each language to language of instruction and home language exposure. Patterns indicate the need for Spanish instruction to maintain robust rates of Spanish growth and English growth rates in Spanish, bilingual, and English‐only instruction. Significant differences in English and Spanish oral language abilities were also noted at the intercept between children who were Spanish dominant versus balanced bilinguals. Implications for research and practice are provided.

Dual Language Profiles in Spanish-Speaking English Learners.

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe latent dual language profiles in a large sample of school-age Spanish-English bilingual children designated as English learners (ELs) by their school district. Data for this study include 847 Spanish-speaking ELs from kindergarten to third grade. Spanish and English narrative retell language samples were collected from all participants. Four oral language measures were calculated in Spanish and English, including the subordination index, moving average type-token ratio, narrative structure scheme (NSS), and words per minute using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript. These indicator measures were used in a latent profile analysis to identify dual language profiles. The optimal model represents a four-profile solution, including a Spanish-dominant group (average Spanish, low English), an English-dominant group (low Spanish, average English), and two balanced groups (a balanced-average group and a balanced-high group). Additionally, participants displayed uneven performance across language domains and distinct patterns of unique strength or weakness in a specific domain in one of their two languages. Findings from this study highlight the large variability in English and Spanish oral language abilities in school-age Spanish-speaking ELs and suggest that a dichotomous classification of ELs versus English-proficient students may not be sufficient to determine the type of educational program that best fits a specific bilingual child's need. These findings highlight the need to assess both languages across multiple language domains to paint a representative picture of a bilingual child's language abilities. The dual language profiles identified may be used to guide the educational program selection process to improve the congruence among the linguistic needs of an individual child, teachers' use of instructional language, and the goals of the educational program (i.e., improving English proficiency vs. supporting dual language development). https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.20151836.

‘What's the magic word?’: mapping oral language interventions implemented in prevention and early intervention programmes

ABSTRACT The nationally funded Prevention and Early Intervention (PEI) programme aimed to design, deliver and evaluate interventions to improve a range of outcomes for children growing up in areas of low socio-economic status (SES). A key focus for many PEI programmes was to improve the oral language abilities of children, recognising its important link to a range of literacy, learning, social, emotional and behavioural indicators. This paper reviewed the published reports of PEI and community programmes that implemented oral language interventions for children, parents and practitioners. This mapping exercise demonstrated that the oral language interventions implemented varied extensively and were predominantly evaluated through gathering the perspectives of those receiving the supports. A noticeable gap was the lack of a national evaluation framework of the oral language interventions provided, resulting in difficulties making comparisons, determining impact and contributing to the evidence base of the effectiveness of bespoke interventions designed and delivered. Implications of this mapping exercise are outlined for the future implementation and evaluation of universal and targeted oral language interventions.

Relations between oral language skills and English reading achievement among Spanish-English bilingual children: a quantile regression analysis.

Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children’s oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure and input. Consequently, there may be greater variability in the associations between oral language proficiency and reading achievement among bilingual children than there is for monolingual children. This study evaluated how vocabulary knowledge and morphosyntactic ability in Spanish and English were associated with English reading achievement among 117 bilingual kindergarten and first grade children in the USA using both OLS and quantile regression. Results indicated that although English vocabulary and morphosyntax were both significantly associated with reading achievement, English vocabulary knowledge was most strongly associated with reading at higher quantiles of reading achievement. Cross-language analyses indicated that both Spanish vocabulary and morphosyntax made significant contributions to predicting English reading achievement beyond the effects of English oral language. Spanish vocabulary was uniquely predictive of reading at high and low quantiles of English reading, whereas relations between Spanish morphosyntax and English reading did not differ across quantiles. These results were consistent with predictions derived from theoretical models such as the simple view of reading and suggest that Spanish vocabulary knowledge may provide more unique information about children’s underlying capacity for acquiring language and literacy skill than does morphosyntax.

Understanding the nature and severity of reading difficulties among students with language and reading comprehension difficulties.

This study investigated the presence of word reading difficulties in a sample of students in Grades 1-4 (n = 357) identified with language and reading comprehension difficulties. This study also examined whether distinct word reading and listening comprehension profiles emerged within this sample and the extent to which these groups varied in performance on cognitive and demographic variables. Findings showed that the majority of students (51%) with language and reading comprehension difficulties demonstrated significant risk in word reading (more than 1 SD below the mean), even though the participant screening procedures did not examine word reading directly. Three latent profiles emerged when students were classified into subgroups based on their performance in listening comprehension (LC) and word reading (WR): (1) severe difficulties in LC and moderate difficulties in WR (11%), (2) mild difficulties in both LC and WR (50%), and (3) moderate difficulties in LC and mild difficulties in WR (39%). Of note, even though students were identified for participation on the basis of poor oral language and reading comprehension abilities, all profiles demonstrated some degree of word reading difficulties. Findings revealed there were differences in age and performance on measures of working memory, nonverbal reasoning, and reading comprehension performance between profiles. Implications for educators providing instruction to students with or at risk for dyslexia and developmental language disorders were discussed.

Impacting Change in Classroom Literacy Instruction: A Further Investigation of the Better Start Literacy Approach

A controlled intervention study supported the effectiveness of teachers implementing an integrated intervention (Better Start Literacy Approach; BSLA) to accelerate foundational literacy skills for children in Year 1 with low levels of oral language ability in a community with significant challenges to effective teaching and learning (Gillon et al., 2019). As part of an implementation approach, the current study aimed to investigate whether teachers from less challenging contexts can successfully implement the Better Start Literacy Approach with reduced support from researchers. Two schools with a total of 93 Year 0/1 children participated in the teacher-led classroom literacy intervention, with 20% of sample classified as linguistically diverse. A series of research questions explored the impact of the intervention on children’s foundational literacy skills. Repeated measures general linear models demonstrated a positive impact of the intervention for the research group compared to the control group. Further analysis demonstrated the intervention was equally effective for linguistically diverse learners. The findings have important implications for better understanding the effectiveness of the BSLA in differing contexts and for linguistically diverse learners, further adding to the research for this literacy intervention.

Screening for Language Difficulties in Disadvantaged Populations on Entry to Early Years Education: Challenges and Opportunities.

Children aged 3–4 years (n = 876) were recruited from deprived areas in England, and a significant minority of the sample were second language learners. Oral language ability was assessed using child administered standardized measures, and parents reported on children’s language. We adapted the Language Use Inventory [LUI; (1)] to capture carer’s reports of the children’s structural language in the language of instruction and their home language (where appropriate). The final measure included six subscales from the original: use of simple words, requests for help, gaining attention, talking about activities/actions, interactions with others, and building sentences. Children’s language abilities and non-verbal abilities were below norms on all standardized tests administered except non-word repetition. Factor analysis indicated that all the six scales of the adapted parent completed measure loaded on one language factor. The revised total scale score correlated significantly (p < 0.0005) with child assessed language measures, specifically expressive vocabulary and grammar. Different patterns across gender, language status and parental education were examined. Sensitivity and specificity of the scale to identify children with the greatest delays were evaluated. These preliminary data indicated that parent-reported information on children’s language skills at 3 years of age has the potential to provide a reliable indicator to inform pedagogy and practice at the start of nursery school. Study limitations are examined and avenues for future development explored.

The maintenance of Japanese as a heritage language in Mexico: evidence from Japanese pre-war migrants and newcomers

Abstract This article reports the first sociolinguistic investigation of heritage language maintenance in two distinct types of Japanese migrant community in Mexico City – pre-war labour migrants and recent self-movers. We investigate which social factors most strongly contribute to the preservation of Japanese oral language ability in these two communities. The results confirm the significant effects of languages used in the home and educational domains upon the maintenance of their heritage language in both old and new migrant communities, while highlighting the community-specific effects of both age and languages used in the workplace among the old community and those of contact with relatives and friends in Japan in the case of the newcomer community. We argue that these differences indicate that in the older community, where a strong solidarity network has been developed but where contact with relatives in Japan has been mostly lost, the use of Japanese in the workplace is most likely to help them maintain it, whilst in the more recent newcomer community with more loose-knit Japanese networks within Mexico, frequent interaction with their relatives and friends in Japan serves to strongly support the retention of their high language ability. This article concludes that heritage language use in both home and school is indeed the fundamental determiner of migrant heritage language survival, whereas different factors, such as the use of the heritage language in the workplace and contact with relatives and friends in the homeland, may aid in its preservation, depending upon the recency of the community’s arrival as well as the strength of community’s network.

Parental Acculturation and Children's Bilingual Abilities: A Study With Chinese American and Mexican American Preschool DLLs.

Previous studies support the link of parental acculturation to their children’s academic achievement, identity, and family relations. Prior research also suggests that parental language proficiency is associated with children’s vocabulary knowledge. However, few studies have examined the links of parental acculturation to young children’s oral language abilities. As preschool oral language skills have been shown to predict future academic achievement, it is critical to understand the relations between parental acculturation and bilingual abilities with young immigrant children. Furthermore, few studies have examined the links between parental acculturation and children’s bilingual ability among different immigrant groups who live in the same areas to understand possible similarities and differences. To address these gaps, this study examines these relations in two of the largest and fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States, Chinese American and Mexican American families. A total of 119 dual language learners (DLLs; 64 Chinese Americans and 55 Mexican Americans) enrolled in Head Start programs in Northern California were recruited. DLLs were assessed on oral language measures in both their heritage language (HL) and English. Parental interviews were conducted to obtain parental acculturation and language proficiency. Results showed no significant group differences between Chinese American and Mexican American parents on the majority of their acculturation dimensions. Furthermore, there were no significant group differences in the bilingual abilities between Chinese American and Mexican American DLLs. Cluster analysis identified four groups of DLLs based on their bilingual ability: high language ability in both English and HL, low language ability in both, English-dominant, and HL-dominant. Results suggest that parental acculturation levels are more similar than different among the four groups. On average, parents in all four groups had stronger ties to their heritage culture and HL than to the American culture. Results also showed links between parental cultural identities and children’s language dominance. Parents of English-dominant children had significantly higher levels of American identity than the parents of children with high ability in both languages. Implications are discussed.

Enhancing reading skills through a video game mixing action mechanics and cognitive training.

In modern societies, training reading skills is fundamental since poor-reading children are at high risk of struggling both at school and in life. Reading relies not only on oral language abilities but also on several executive functions. Considering their importance for literacy, training executive functions-particularly, attentional control has been suggested as a promising way of improving reading skills. For this reason, we developed a video game-based cognitive intervention aimed at improving several facets of executive functions. This game is composed of mini-games that apply gamified versions of standard clinical exercises linked through a game environment with action video game dynamics. Here, in a study involving 151 typically reading children, we demonstrated that after this general-domain behavioural intervention reading abilities, as well as attentional and planning skills, were significantly improved. Our results showed that training attentional control can translate into better reading efficiency, maintained at a follow-up test 6 months later.

Predicting Language Performance From Narrative Language Samples.

Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell, collected in kindergarten, and an oral language factor in grades kindergarten through 3. Our specific questions were to determine the extent to which metrics from narrative language sample analysis are concurrently related to language in kindergarten and predict language through Grade 3. Participants were a sample of 284 children who were administered a narrative retell task in kindergarten and a battery of vocabulary and grammar measures in kindergarten through Grade 3. Language samples were analyzed for number of different words, mean length of utterance, and a relatively new metric, percent grammatical utterances (PGUs). Structural equation models were used to estimate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships. The narrative language sample metrics were consistently correlated with the individual vocabulary and grammar measures as well as the language factor in each grade, and also consistently and uniquely predicted the language factor in each grade. Standardized path estimates in the structural equation models ranged from 0.20 to 0.39. This study found narrative language sample metrics to be predictive, concurrently and longitudinally, of a latent factor of language from kindergarten through Grade 3. These results further validate the importance of collecting and analyzing narrative language samples, to include PGU along with more traditional metrics, and point to directions for future research. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17700980.

Reading and Oral Language Skills in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: Influence of Socioeconomic, Educational, and Family Variables.

The Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a delay in language skills that cannot be explained by sensory or cognitive difficulties. Currently, there are limited studies that analyze how socioeconomic, educational, and family variables influence reading skills of Spanish-speaking children with DLD at school. This study identifies how oral language performance and reading skills of children with DLD are linked to socioeconomic, educational, and family factors. Oral language, phonological awareness and reading abilities were assessed in a sample of 15 children diagnosed with DLD and their controls by age and gender. Children's parents answered a Likert scale questionnaire inquiring about some aspects related to the family's socioeconomic status, mothers' educational level, family support, academic average, and repetition of school years of the participants. The results indicate that children with DLD have a lower performance in phonological awareness tasks as well as in reading abilities. There is also a direct relationship between their performance in language and reading skills and variables as mother's educational level and family support. Likewise, children in the sample have a lower academic average as well as a higher school year repetition rate interfering in their academic life. Educational implications of these findings and a discussion on possible causality axes and protective factors that contributes to support this population are presented.

The Development and Evaluation of Interactional Competence Elicitor for Oral Language Assessments

This paper describes the development and evaluation of Interaction Competence Elicitor (ICE), a spoken dialog system (SDS) for the delivery of a paired oral discussion task in the context of language assessment. The purpose of ICE is to sustain a topic‐specific conversation with a test taker in order to elicit discourse that can be later judged to assess the test taker's oral language ability, including interactional competence. The development of ICE is reported in detail to provide guidance for future developers of similar systems. The performance of ICE is evaluated on two aspects: (a) by analyzing system errors that occur at different stages in the natural language processing (NLP) pipeline in terms of both their preventability and their impact on the downstream stages of the pipeline, and (b) by analyzing questionnaire and semistructured interview data to establish the test takers' experience with the system. Findings suggest that ICE was robust in 90% of the dialog turns it produced, and test takers noted both positive and negative aspects of communicating with the system as opposed to a human interlocutor. We conclude that this prototype system lays important groundwork for the development and use of specialized SDSs in the assessment of oral communication, which includes interactional competence.

Does the Simple View of Reading Explain Korean Elementary EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension?

Numerous studies have supported the simple view of reading by showing the significant predictive roles of oral language comprehension ability and decoding skills in the reading comprehension of monolinguals and second language learners. However, little is known about its applicability to young foreign language learners who do not have much access to the target language and literacy input outside the school and especially those whose first and second languages are typologically different. This study was designed to examine the contribution of English oral language comprehension ability and decoding skills to the reading comprehension of fifth-grade Korean EFL learners. In doing so, the indirect effects of oral language ability and phonological awareness were also considered, and English reading fluency and Korean reading comprehension abilities were controlled for. The findings not only support the simple view of reading but also highlight the indirect effects of oral language comprehension ability and phonological awareness on reading comprehension abilities via the effects of decoding skills.

Towards development of guidelines for virtual administration of paediatric standardized language and literacy assessments: Considerations for clinicians and researchers.

Objectives:Previous virtual care literature within the field of speech-language pathology has primarily focused on validating the virtual use of intervention programmes. There are fewer articles addressing the validity of conducting virtual assessments, particularly standardized assessment of oral language and literacy abilities in children. In addition, there is a lack of practical, useful recommendations available to support clinicians and researchers on how to conduct these assessment measures virtually. Given the recent rapid rise in virtual care and research as a result of the Coronavirus-19 pandemic, clinicians and researchers require guidance on best practices for virtual administration of these tools imminently. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature by providing such recommendations.Methods:We (a) completed a narrative review of the extant literature, and (b) conducted semi-structured interviews with a group of 12 clinicians, students and researchers who had administered standardized language and literacy assessments with a variety of monolingual and multilingual school-aged children, with and without speech and language difficulties, in clinical and research settings. Six themes: candidacy for virtual assessment, communication and collaboration with caregivers, technology and equipment, virtual administration, ethics, consent and confidentiality, and considerations for bilingual populations were identified as a result of these two processes and were used to develop a set of recommendations to guide the use of standardized assessments in a virtual setting. In line with the Guidelines International Network, these recommendations were rated by group members, and reviewed by external stakeholders. A quasi-Delphi consensus procedure was used to reach agreement on ratings for recommendations.Results:We have developed and outlined several recommendations for clinicians and researchers to guide their use of standardized language and literacy assessments in virtual care, across six key themes.Conclusions:This article is one of the first to share practical recommendations for virtual assessment in the domain of oral language and literacy assessment for clinicians and researchers. We hope the current recommendations will facilitate future clinical research in this area, and as the body of research in this field grows, this article will act as a basis for the development of formal Clinical Practice Guidelines.

Identifying play skills that predict children’s language in the beginning of the first year of school

ABSTRACT Strong oral language skills are foundational for literacy development and begin before a child enters formal schooling. Oral language development has been related to pretend play abilities in children. Children, particularly those from disadvantaged areas, who enter school with low pretend play levels and oral language abilities, are at risk for learning. This quantitative study investigated the pretend play and oral language abilities of a group of 30 children from a disadvantaged area in Victoria, Australia, in their first year of school. Standardised play and language assessments were administered by researchers independent of each other. Results showed that, as a group, the children were entering school with play and oral language abilities below expected range for their age. Object substitution, the ability to symbolise and use an object as something else, was found to be a predictor of a child’s expressive and receptive language ability. Applying a socio-cultural lens enabled further exploration of the findings in relation to children’s lives. Implications for practice that are mindful of the policy context in which teachers work are noted.

Oral sentence generation training to improve fifth and 10th graders\u2019 writing

Text generation—the mental translation of ideas into language at word, sentence, and discourse levels—involves oral language abilities. However, oral language skills are rarely a target of writing interventions. We ran an intervention to improve fifth and 10th graders’ written production through the development of oral sentence generation (grammatical and syntactic) skills. One hundred and fifteen students—68 fifth graders (four classrooms) and 47 tenth graders (four classrooms)—participated in a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized controlled trial. Two fifth-grade classrooms (n = 35) and two 10th-grade classrooms (n = 20) received nine 90-min sessions (3 weeks, three sessions a week) of oral language intervention immediately after the pretest (experimental groups); the two other fifth- (n = 33) and 10th-grade classrooms (n = 27) received business-as-usual writing instruction and received a delayed oral language intervention after the posttest (waiting list group). The intervention consisted of team-based games to improve oral sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills. We assessed written sentence generation, written sentence reformulation, written text quality (macrostructure and language), and text writing fluency before (pretest) and after (posttest) the intervention and 5 weeks after the intervention (follow-up). The results showed that training on oral sentence generation skills can lead to significant gains in both sentence generation and sentence reformulation skills and text macrostructural quality. Improvement at the sentence level was, however, significant only for the younger writers (fifth graders).

Effects of computerized grapho-phonological training on literacy acquisition and vocabulary knowledge in children with an immigrant background learning German as L2

As a consequence of globalization and migration, the number of children receiving literacy instruction in their second language (L2) is high and still increasing. Therefore, teachers need instruction methods that are effective in both L1 and L2 learners. Here, we investigate the effectiveness of a computerized training program combining phoneme perception, phonological awareness, and systematic phonics, in a sample of second-graders (N = 26) instructed in German as L2. Based on prior evidence concerning (1) literacy acquisition in L2 and (2) effects of literacy development on oral language abilities, we expected significant training effects on children’s literacy skills and vocabulary knowledge. The children of the training group worked through the program during school lessons, 20 min per day, for a period of 8 weeks. The controls continued to receive standard classroom instruction. German tests of phonological awareness, reading, spelling, and vocabulary were performed at three time points (pretest, immediate posttest, and follow-up after 9 weeks). Analyses confirmed that improvements in phonological awareness, spelling, and vocabulary between pretest and posttest were stronger in the training group when compared to the controls. For spelling and vocabulary, these effects were still significant at follow-up. Effect sizes were medium to high. For the reading measures, no group differences were found. In sum, the results yield further evidence for the effectiveness of phonics-based literacy instruction in L2 learners, and for the beneficial effects of basic literacy skills on novel word learning.