What you say, and how you say it: Preschoolers' growth in vocabulary and communication skills differentially predict kindergarten academic achievement and self‐regulation

Ramsook, K. Ashana; Welsh, Janet A.; Bierman, Karen L.

doi:10.1111/sode.12425

Cited by 37 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…In all tests, we controlled for expressive and receptive vocabulary development, and family SES. Early vocabulary predicts later social skills (Izard et al, 2001 ; Mostow et al, 2002 ) and school achievement (Ramsook et al 2019 ), for children in both low‐ and middle‐income families (Ackerman et al, 2003 ). Language skills also predict false‐belief task performance, and moderate relations between false‐belief performance and social competence (Astington, 2003 ; Astington & Jenkins, 1999 ; DeRosney & Hughes, 2006 ; de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000 ; de Villiers & Pyers, 2002 ; Hale & Tager‐Flusberg, 2003 ; Jenkins & Astington, 1996 ; Watson et al, 2001 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

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An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false‐belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false‐belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false‐belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false‐belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true‐belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true‐ and false‐belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true‐belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true‐belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English‐speakers. Children were recruited from university‐sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. ...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Fabricius

Gonzales

Pesch

et al. 2021

Monographs Society Res Child

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“…Conceptual print knowledge has been minimally explored in children with hearing loss specifically, but it has been well documented for children with normal hearing. Many studies of children with normal hearing have found significant positive correlations between measures of conceptual print knowledge and vocabulary, indicating that children with larger vocabularies are more likely to score well on print knowledge measures than children with smaller vocabularies (Dickinson et al, 2003;Dickinson & Snow, 1987;Ramsook et al, 2019). Justice et al (2010) similarly found that initial language ability moderated effects of intervention on conceptual print knowledge gains.…”

Section: Conceptual Vocabulary Knowledgementioning

confidence: 95%

“…It is possible that, for children with hearing loss and with normal hearing, delays in conceptual print knowledge are exacerbated by delays in vocabulary (e.g., Dickinson et al, 2003;Dickinson & Snow, 1987;Justice et al, 2010;Ramsook et al, 2019). Conceptual print knowledge has been minimally explored in children with hearing loss specifically, but it has been well documented for children with normal hearing.…”

Section: Conceptual Vocabulary Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Print Knowledge in Preschool Children With Hearing Loss

Lund

Miller

Douglas³

et al. 2020

Perspect ASHA SIGs

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Purpose The purpose of this article was to examine evidence that (a) published measures may tap different categories of print knowledge and result in disparate findings in the literature, (b) concept vocabulary knowledge in children with hearing loss may exacerbate deficits in conceptual print knowledge, and (c) concept vocabulary can be taught via direct instruction for preschool children with hearing loss. Method In Study 1, an item analysis of published print knowledge measures was performed to determine the prevalence of concept vocabulary in test items. Additionally, the performance on a conceptual print knowledge measure was compared for preschool children with and without hearing loss. In Study 2, four preschool children participated in a multiple probe across behaviors treatment design to determine if concept vocabulary could be explicitly taught to children with hearing loss. Results Differences emerged in use of concept vocabulary on test items across the measures, which may explain disparate findings that have been reported in this area. Additionally, children with hearing loss performed lower than children with typical hearing on items that contained concept vocabulary but not on items that did not. Finally, we found initial evidence that direct instruction can improve concept vocabulary for children with hearing loss, and it might not be necessary to separately target each concept category. Conclusion This series of studies lays groundwork for future research confirming a connection between conceptual print knowledge and conceptual vocabulary knowledge, and offers evidence for intervention that could be used clinically to teach conceptual vocabulary.

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“…Toddlerhood is a period of both pronounced growth in language abilities and more complex forms of parent–child interaction (Harrist & Waugh, 2002; Huttenlocher et al, 2010), making this a prime developmental period to examine the role of maternal depression in child language development. In addition, children begin to enter formal schooling around the age of 5, and language skills are a key indicator of school readiness and have been tied to future academic success (Heaviside & Farris, 1993; Ramsook et al, 2020).…”

Section: Maternal Depression and Child Language Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal depressive symptoms and language development: The moderating role of child temperament.

Hentges

Madigan

Tough

et al. 2021

Developmental Psychology

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The current study examined the interaction between maternal depressive symptoms and child temperament in predicting subsequent child language skills. Participants were 252 mother-child dyads recruited from the All Our Families longitudinal cohort, a primarily middle-class sample (62.9% completed postsecondary education) from Alberta, Canada (90.5% White, 6% Asian, 3.5% other). Maternal depressive symptoms at age 3, controlling for prenatal depressive symptoms, did not evidence a direct effect on child language skills at age 5 (49.6% males; mean [M] = 5.12 years old, standard deviation [SD] = .11). However, both child surgency and effortful control interacted with maternal depression at age 3 to predict later language skills. Low effortful control was a risk factor for poorer language abilities in contexts of high maternal depressive symptoms. High child surgency emerged as a differential susceptibility marker, predicting poorer language skills in contexts of high maternal depressive symptoms but better language skills in contexts of low depressive symptoms. Negative affect did not interact with maternal depressive symptoms in predicting language skills. These findings highlight the complex interaction between maternal and child characteristics in predicting language development during a developmental period in which language skills are a prime indicator of school readiness and a predictor of future academic achievement and socioemotional adjustment.

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What you say, and how you say it: Preschoolers' growth in vocabulary and communication skills differentially predict kindergarten academic achievement and self‐regulation

Cited by 37 publications

References 52 publications

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Print Knowledge in Preschool Children With Hearing Loss

Maternal depressive symptoms and language development: The moderating role of child temperament.

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