Purpose We compared the narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children at risk (AR) for developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls to address two goals: (a) further our understanding of the Mandarin DLD phenotype and (b) examine the role of elicitation method in differentiating AR from TD. Method Twenty-one AR children and 21 age- and nonverbal IQ–matched peers produced two stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narrative, first following an adult model (i.e., story-retell) and then without a model (i.e., story-tell). Group and task effects were analyzed on macrostructure and microstructure measures. Results For general macrostructure score and sentence complexity, children in the AR group performed more poorly than TD children on the more challenging story-tell task and showed decreased scores from retell to tell tasks. In addition, children in the AR group showed poorer performance on number of different words. Productivity and grammaticality measures did not show group differences. Discussion Consistent with previous findings, grammaticality and productivity were relatively preserved but story macrostructure, lexical diversity, and sentence complexity were vulnerable in Mandarin-speaking children with or AR for DLD. Having an adult model benefited both groups in sentence complexity and story macrostructure and potentially helped maintain the performance in TD children as they engaged in the more challenging story-telling task.

Usage-based accounts of language acquisition suggest that bilingual language proficiency is dynamic and susceptible to changes in language use. The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented modifications in the language learning environment of developing bilinguals. Drawing on this unique opportunity, we analyzed existing data of two matched groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (ages 4 to 8 years, n = 38), one tested before (pre-COVID group) and the other during (COVID group) the pandemic. The dataset comprises responses to a language environment questionnaire, and scores on a sentence comprehension task and a sentence recall task in the bilinguals’ two languages. Questionnaire data revealed a richer Mandarin language environment for children in the COVID group compared to peers in the pre-COVID group. On both comprehension and production tasks, the two groups performed comparably in English but the COVID group showed better performance in Mandarin than the pre-COVID group. Within the pre-COVID group, English was stronger than Mandarin in both comprehension and production. Within the COVID group, the two languages were balanced in comprehension and Mandarin was stronger than English in production. Moreover, language use variables were correlated with production performance in both languages. These patterns illustrate the intimate relationships between language use and bilingual language proficiency through the lens of COVID-19 induced language environment modification.

Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population. Furthermore, we aimed to compare five scoring systems for evaluating children's MSRT performance. Method: In Study 1, the MSRT was administered to 59 typically developing (TD) children aged 3;6 (years;months) to 6;5 in China. The task was examined regarding its ability to correlate with language indices derived from children's narrative samples. In Study 2, both a TD and a DLD group were recruited to investigate the task's sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios to distinguish between children with and without DLD. Results: Study 1 showed that, using four of the five scoring methods, TD children's performance on the MSRT significantly correlated with all the language measures derived from narratives. Study 2 showed that the MSRT was able to differentiate children with and without DLD. Conclusion: The MSRT is a promising tool to reflect language abilities and identify DLD in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Based on the current evidence, we recommend that researchers and clinicians select the number of errors in the syllable method or the binary method when scoring responses to meet their specific needs. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19386257

People are eager to know and recast the self in the eyes of others, even at a personal cost. However, it remains unknown what drives people to pursue costly evaluations of the self. Here, we propose that the evaluation of the self is valuable and that such subjective value placed on evaluation drives the costly-to-know behavior. By measuring the amount of money that individuals would forgo for the opportunity to know evaluations from other people (social evaluation) or a computer program (non-social evaluation), we quantified the subjective value individuals assigned to the evaluation on the self. The results from 5 studies (n = 375) lent cognitive and computational support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, the subjective value was modulated by the source and valence of the evaluation. Participants equally valued positive and negative non-social evaluations, characterized by a shared unknown aversion computation. However, individuals computed independent unknown aversion towards positive and negative social evaluations and placed a higher value on the opportunity to know another person’s evaluation on positive than negative aspects. Such a valence-dependent valuation of the social evaluation was facilitated by oxytocin, a neuropeptide linked to linked to social feedback learning and valuation processes, which decreased the value ascribed to negative social evaluation. Taken together, the current study reveals the psychological and computational processes underlying self-image formation and updating and suggests a role of oxytocin in modulating the value of social evaluation.