Emiddia Longobardi

Relationship between gestures and words in children with Down's syndrome and typically developing children in the early stages of communicative development

BACKGROUND Previous research has emphasized the importance of gesture in early communicative development. These studies have reported that gestures are used frequently during the first two years of life and may play a transitional role in the language acquisition process. Although there are now numerous descriptions of the relationship between gesture and the developing language system in typically-developing (TD) children, relatively little is known about the nature and early development of the gesture-language system in children with developmental disorders involving specific profiles of language delay and/or impairment. PRIMARY OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to compare early word and gesture use in children with DS and in typically-developing children to investigate potential differences in the relationship between gestural and verbal communication in early language development. METHODS AND PROCEDURES Ten children from upper-middle class families participated in the study. The five children with DS (3 boys and 2 girls) had an average chronological age of 47.6 months, an average mental age of 22.4 months, and an average language age of 18 months. Each child with DS was matched to a typically developing child on the basis of gender, language age, and observed expressive vocabulary size. Children were videotaped for 30 minutes as they interacted spontaneously with their mothers. All communicative and intelligible gestures and words produced by the children were transcribed from the videotapes. Data analyses focused on: a) overall production of gestures and words (i.e., gesture and word tokens); b) the size of childrens gestural and verbal repertoires (i.e., gesture and word types); and c) production and informational content of gesture-word combinations. MAIN OUTCOMES AND RESULTS Although children with DS had significantly smaller gestural repertoires than their language age-matched peers, there was no reliable difference between the two groups in the overall use of gesture. In addition, with DS produced two-element combinations (primarily gesture-word combinations) and did so at a rate comparable to that observed among their TD counterparts. However, no two-word combinations were observed among children with DS, and there were also group differences in the information contained in childrens gesture-word combinations. CONCLUSIONS Taken together, these findings suggest that in addition to the well-documented global delays in early communicative development, children with DS may exhibit additional pockets of delay, specifically in making the transition from one- to two-word speech. Results are further discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the organization of the developing gesture-language system and for the assessment of gesture in young children with communicative delays and disorders.

A parent report instrument for early language assessment

A structured questionnaire for evaluating the level of communicative and linguistic development at 12, 16 and 20 months of age respectively was administered to the parents of 23 children for three different assessments. For a subsample of 14 subjects the questionnaire was filled in by the parents and by a trained observer in a two-hour observational session at home. The aim of the study was two-fold: (a) to verify the validity of the instrument and specifically its predictive validity; (b) to verify the reliability of the information given by parents through a direct comparison between the data in the questionnaire filled in by the parents and the data in the same questionnaire filled in by the observer. Results show that, on the basis of measures reported at 12 months, the instrument can predict linguistic development at 20 months as evaluated by means of a Vocabulary Checklist. Furthermore, the pattern of communicative and linguistic development reported by parents is consistent with that reported by the observer. Finally, the samples lexical development exhibits a wide range of individual variation, with lexicons consisting of about 8 to 628 different words at 20 months of age.

Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech*

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.

Gesture and speech in maternal input to children with Down's syndrome

BACKGROUND Despite recent interest in relationships between maternal gesture and speech and communicative development in typically developing (TD) children, little work has examined either speech or gesture in mothers of children with Downs syndrome (DS). AIMS To compare aspects of speech and gesture production by mothers of children with DS with that of mothers of TD children. METHODS & PROCEDURES Participants were five mothers of children with DS (mean chronological age (CA) = 47.6 months; mean mental age (MA) = 22.4 months) and five mothers of TD children. To equate for expressive language ability, children in the TD and DS groups were individually matched on the basis of: (1) gender; (2) correspondence between the TD childs chronological age and the DS childs language age; and (3) observed expressive vocabulary size. Each mother-child dyad was videotaped for approximately 30 min during free play. Data analyses focused on: (1) the number and types (speech only, gesture only, mixed) of maternal utterances; (2) the gesture types (deictic, iconic, conventional, emphatic); and (3) for mixed utterances, the structure and the temporal patterning of spoken and gestured components. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Relative to mothers of TD children, mothers of children with DS produced significantly fewer utterances overall, but the distribution of utterance types did not differ between the two groups. Relative to mothers of TD children, mothers of children with DS used proportionately more deictic gestures and made more frequent use of showing. Mothers of TD children produced more pointing gestures. Finally, mothers of children with DS produced a significantly higher proportion of utterances consisting of a single gesture and a single verbal utterance; in contrast to mothers of TD children, more complex structures (one gesture with multiple verbal utterances, one verbal utterance with multiple gestures) were never observed. Within the category of utterances consisting of a gesture and a single verbal utterance, mothers of children with DS tended to produce gestures that were held throughout the complete verbal utterance, while the gestures of mothers of TD children tended to co-occur with only a portion of the utterance. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that mothers of children with DS adjust their communication to the developmental status of their child. Results are discussed in terms of the role of gesture in maternal communication and in the regulation of mother-child interaction.

Maternal speech to 1‐year‐old children in two Italian cultural contexts

The present study examines maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two cultural contexts in the same nation: an urban industrial town (Padua) and a small rural village (Ruoti). The aim was to evaluate if and how intranational cultural variation influences the ways in which Italian-speaking mothers use language when addressing their children. We hypothesized that mothers in the rural context would adopt speech acts with a control function (‘directive’ speech style) more than mothers in the urban context, whereas urban mothers would use speech acts with a didactic and a tutorial function more than rural mothers (‘child-centred’ speech style). Forty primiparous mothers and their 13-month-old children were videotaped at home in a play session. Maternal speech from transcripts was examined in terms of five different communicative functions (Tutorial, Didactic, Conversational, Control, and Asynchronous) using a 21-category coding scheme validated in previous studies. Parents also completed a demographic and living standards questionnaire. The results showed systematic cultural differences in a variety of maternal communicative functions, presumably related to different life environments and childrearing practices in the two sites.

Nature and stability of individual differences in early lexical development of Italian-speaking children

The present study aims to identify individual differences in both rate and style of language acquisition in a sample of 15 Italian- speaking children, observed at 16 and 20 months of age. The nature as well as the stability of such differences over time were investigated, and the usefulness of different criteria for defining stylistic tendencies was evaluated. Fifteen middle-high class children and their mothers participated in the longitudinal study. The mother-child dyads were videotaped at home when the children were 16 and 20 month old. In addition to the observational data, at the same age points the mothers were administered a structured questionnaire designed to evaluate the level of the childs linguistic development.

Typical and Delayed Lexical Development in Italian

PURPOSE The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages. They addressed the issue of delay versus deviance by comparing vocabulary composition in late talkers and younger vocabulary-size-matched children. METHOD Participants were 398 Italian and 206 U.S. children ages 18-35 months. RESULTS Vocabulary size did not differ significantly by language, and age and gender effects on vocabulary size were not moderated by language. The Italian-English Q correlation for percentage word use scores was .55, lower than the within-language concordance of .90 and above. Cross-linguistic concordance declined as age and vocabulary size increased. Many cross-linguistic word matches (63 words) were found among the top 100 words. Italian late talkers were similar to younger vocabulary-size-matched Italian children in vocabulary composition, consistent with findings for English, Greek, and Korean. CONCLUSIONS In both languages, the early lexicons of late talkers and typical talkers contained many of the same words, indicating considerable universality in young childrens lexical development. These common words are therefore good targets for clinical intervention.

Individual differences in the prevalence of words and gestures in the second year of life: developmental trends in Italian children.

This longitudinal study investigated individual differences in the relationship between words and representational gestures in a sample of 104 Italian children between 12 and 23 months of age, using two parent-report questionnaires. Multivariate analyses reached three main conclusions. First, a high gesture frequency did not enhance language development when word production was equated and children showing a prevalence of words over gestures outperformed those showing a prevalence of gestures over words at all ages. Second, an early predominance of gestures at 12 months did not hamper the acquisition of verbal abilities, while the persistence of a gestural advantage at 16 and 20 months was related to a slower language development at 23 months. Finally, for infants with small gestural repertoires at 12 months, a high frequency of gesture use benefitted the process of lexical learning. These findings support the hypothesis that representational gestures bridge the transition from pre-linguistic to symbolic communication. However, they also suggest that the role of representational gestures might be less critical than previously proposed, being mostly evident in the earlier phases of the second year of life.

A longitudinal examination of early communicative development: Evidence from a parent-report questionnaire

The present research employed a longitudinal design to assess the verbal and non-verbal communicative abilities of a sample of 104 children, using two different parent-report instruments: the Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language (QCEL) development at 12, 16, and 20 months, and the Italian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Gestures at 23 months. The results supported and extended previous data about the validity of the QCEL, by showing that: (1) both verbal and non-verbal variables predicted the level of language development at 23 months; (2) children classified as at-risk with the QCEL had reduced vocabulary size and a lower number of sentences at 23 months; (3) early individual differences in the use of words and gestures were associated with later differences in linguistic abilities. It is concluded that the longitudinal use of the QCEL questionnaire can provide useful information about language development.

Children's Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs in Italian: Contrasting the Roles of Frequency and Positional Salience in Maternal Language.

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on childrens acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of twenty-six mother-child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted childrens production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, childrens growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories.