Parental Report via a Mobile App in the Context of Early Language Trajectories: StarWords Study Protocol

Abstract

Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0–3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children’s language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children’s performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project’s novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations.

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: updates from the CDI Advisory Board

“…Kachergis et al (2022) reports on the development and testing of CDI-CATs for both comprehension and production vocabulary in both American English and Mexican Spanish (see also Kachergis and Dale, 2023). Like CATs in other languages (Mayor and Mani, 2019;Mieszkowska et al, 2022), even very short American English CDI-CATs (20-25 items) recovered participant abilities very well with little bias across ages. Moreover, a validation study with more than 200 children whose parents completed both the American English CDI-CAT and the American English CDI:WS showed a very strong correlation (r = 0.92).…”

Using Parent Report to Measure Vocabulary in Young Bilingual Children: A Scoping Review

“…In South Africa, an interuniversity collaboration is focused on developing CDIs for all South African languages (e.g., Southwood et al., 2021). In Poland, researchers are using mobile and web‐based versions of parent report instruments to collect densely sampled vocabulary data from multilingual children (Mieszkowska et al., 2022). Other efforts are aimed at documentation of understudied languages (Hellwig et al., 2021), which will provide a rich data source for research in language acquisition that could be used to expand assessment of vocabulary in bilingual/multilingual children.…”

“…There is a need to document similarities and differences in vocabulary development in different bilingual/multilingual populations and to develop practical solutions for assessing vocabulary in heterogeneous language contexts. The ongoing development of web‐based platforms and applications where parents can complete the forms using a computer, tablet, or smartphone could reduce the burden for parents and thereby promote more research in this area (e.g., DeMayo et al., 2021; Mieszkowska et al., 2022).…”

“…Reviewing how the field has met these challenges and identifying challenges that remain to be addressed provides useful information for improving our understanding of language development in a growing number of children in the world today. It will be important for the field to continue to evaluate these trends in the literature on a regular basis, especially as the field adds new technologies for assessment (e.g., DeMayo et al., 2021; Mieszkowska et al., 2022) or applications deriving from techniques such as computerized adaptive testing (e.g., Kachergis et al., 2022; Mayor & Mani, 2019). Finally, although the number of studies exploring early bilingual/multilingual development is growing, the field continues to be dominated by research in North America and Europe with children who are learning English as the societal language, which limits the generalizability of the conclusions we can draw.…”

The Norwegian CDI-III as an assessment tool for lexical and grammatical development in preschoolers

“…A recent response to the issue of redundancy in CDI word lists is the development of adaptive versions based on existing CDI data. Here, parents respond to a dynamic word list that adjusts to their responses, meaning that the researcher achieves the wanted information about each child through far fewer questions (e.g., Mayor and Mani, 2019;Kachergis et al, 2022;Mieszkowska et al, 2022). Such adaptive versions are built on data on large numbers of words from a substantial pool of children.…”