Percent Of Utterances Research Articles

Taking Language Samples Home: Feasibility, Reliability, and Validity of Child Language Samples Conducted Remotely With Video Chat Versus In-Person.

PurposeThere has been increased interest in using telepractice for involving more diverse children in research and clinical services, as well as when in-person assessment is challenging, such as during COVID-19. Little is known, however, about the feasibility, reliability, and validity of language samples when conducted via telepractice.MethodChild language samples from parent–child play were recorded either in person in the laboratory or via video chat at home, using parents' preferred commercially available software on their own device. Samples were transcribed and analyzed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Analyses compared measures between-subjects for 46 dyads who completed video chat language samples versus 16 who completed in-person samples; within-subjects analyses were conducted for a subset of 13 dyads who completed both types. Groups did not differ significantly on child age, sex, or socioeconomic status.ResultsThe number of usable samples and percent of utterances with intelligible audio signal did not differ significantly for in-person versus video chat language samples. Child speech and language characteristics (including mean length of utterance, type–token ratio, number of different words, grammatical errors/omissions, and child speech intelligibility) did not differ significantly between in-person and video chat methods. This was the case for between-group analyses and within-child comparisons. Furthermore, transcription reliability (conducted on a subset of samples) was high and did not differ between in-person and video chat methods.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates that child language samples collected via video chat are largely comparable to in-person samples in terms of key speech and language measures. Best practices for maximizing data quality for using video chat language samples are provided.

A Comparison of Mothers' Individual and Simultaneous Book Sharing With Preschool Siblings

Many studies have demonstrated that adults fine tune book-sharing discussions to the developmental levels of preschoolers, but little is known regarding how reading simultaneously to different-aged preschoolers is negotiated. We observed five mothers of different-aged preschoolers sharing books with each child individually and with both children together. Analyses focused on the linguistic complexity of the book, the amount of time spent sharing a book, and on several aspects of the mothers' book-sharing mediation. Results revealed developmental differences on several measures of how mothers mediated with younger as compared to older children individually. Book complexity, the time spent sharing books, and the percent of utterances at higher levels of abstraction were higher when reading to the older children; the number of mediation strategies per minute and the percent of mothers' behaviors that were used to get and maintain attention were higher when reading to the younger children. When reading to both children simultaneously, which aspects of the mediation fell at these different levels varied among the different mothers. This suggests that different mothers reach different solutions to the task of simultaneously reading to preschoolers of different ages. One mother approached the simultaneous book sharing much as she did sharing a book with her older child, one mother approached it as she did with her younger child, one mother simply read and did little mediation, and two mothers appeared to use a mixed strategy in the simultaneous reading condition.