Janet Fletcher

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire overseas: evaluations and applications of the SDQ beyond Europe.

Abstract.Background:During the few years that have passed since it became available, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) has been extensively evaluated and widely applied to assess behaviour disorders of children and adolescents in European countries. In contrast, relatively few reports have published SDQ results obtained in other parts of the world, although its briefness and availability in over 40 languages make this instrument particularly attractive for international collaborations and cross-cultural comparisons concerning clinical and epidemiological issues.Objectives:This initial overview summarises some of these non-European experiences with the SDQ by presenting a selection of projects that have either psychometrically evaluated this novel questionnaire, applied it to screen for behaviour disorders, or employed its parent-, teacher- or self-rated versions as research tools. Since a large part of the mentioned studies are ongoing or have only recently been completed, much of the work reported here is still unpublished.Conclusions:Across a huge variety of cultures and languages, experience gained with the SDQ in other continents has supported European evidence of good psychometric properties and clinical utility of this questionnaire. Since worldwide usage of the SDQ can be expected to increase in the future, more international coordination is encouraged, in order to fully exploit the promising potentials of this versatile assessment tool and systematically investigate cross-cultural differences and similarities in child and adolescent behaviour.

Literacy Outcomes for Students with Speech Impairment: Long-Term Follow-Up.

BACKGROUND Theoretical and empirical support now exists for the finding that many children with expressive phonological impairment experience problems in acquiring phonological awareness and early literacy skills. Few studies, however, have examined the long-term academic and literacy outcomes for this population, in particular as the students leave the final stages of primary school. AIMS The reported study forms the final stage of a longitudinal research project that tracked the phonological processing and literacy skills of a group of children with specific speech impairment from their first year at school (aged 5-6 years). The earlier data provided evidence of a relationship between speech impairment characterized by the presence of non-developmental error processes and weaker phonological awareness and literacy skills in the first 2-3 years at school. It was hypothesized that the effect of this relationship would continue to be apparent as the students completed the final stages of primary school. METHODS & PROCEDURES Fourteen of the original set of 36 students were available for reassessment of their phonological processing, reading and spelling skills at age 12-13 years. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Those children with an original classification of non-developmental speech errors performed significantly more poorly than those with an original classification of developmental errors on phonological awareness and reading comprehension measures. Reading accuracy and spelling scores also showing a similar trend. CONCLUSIONS These findings provide further evidence for the long-term impact of speech impairment. The follow-up data demonstrated ongoing difficulties for students who entered school with expressive speech impairment, particularly those whose speech errors were characterized by non-developmental error processes. The impact was apparent on tasks measuring phonological awareness, reading accuracy and spelling (skills that depend on good phonological processing skills and clear underlying phonological representations). Weaknesses in reading comprehension were also found. These findings have implications for the early identification of those at risk. In addition, intervention approaches for young children with expressive speech difficulties demonstrating these patterns of error should address weak underlying phonological representations and develop phonological awareness skills.

Reading comprehension in children with specific language impairment: an examination of two subgroups

BACKGROUND In reading research, children with specific language impairment (SLI) have tended to be included in groups of children expected to have difficulties with both decoding and reading comprehension (generally poor readers). This is because generally children with specific language impairment display difficulties with phonology as well as syntax and/or semantics. However, children with specific language impairment are a heterogeneous group. Many children with specific language impairment have oral comprehension difficulties that are likely to limit reading comprehension. A subgroup of these children may exhibit intact phonological and decoding skills. If so, they would resemble the children with specific reading comprehension difficulties (poor comprehenders) reported in the literature. AIMS This study sought to identify a group of children with a poor comprehender reading profile amongst children with specific language impairment. It then compared the phonological and oral comprehension skills of the group of 15 poor comprehenders with a group of 15 generally poor readers with specific language impairment, to identify any differences in language skills. Secondarily, the study wanted to determine which of the language tasks best predicted group membership. METHODS & PROCEDURES The study was carried out in two phases. In Phase 1, children with specific language impairment were assessed on the Woodcock Word Attack to identify a group with adequate decoding skills. These children had poor reading comprehension on the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability. From the poor decoders on the Word Attack, a second group of children, matched for age and gender, was selected to form the generally poor reader group. In Phase 2, the participants were assessed on a battery of phonological and oral comprehension tasks. OUTCOMES & RESULTS A group of children exhibiting a poor comprehender reading profile was found to exist amongst children with specific language impairment. As expected, the poor comprehenders performed significantly better than the generally poor readers on phonological awareness tasks. On the oral comprehension tasks, the two groups did not differ at the word and sentence level; however, the poor comprehenders had significantly weaker oral comprehension skills at the paragraph level. CONCLUSIONS This study found that children with specific language impairment, who have equally poor reading comprehension but which differ in their decoding ability, differ not only in their performance on phonological tasks, but also on oral comprehension at the paragraph level. This indicates a need for paragraph-level oral comprehension to be included in assessment. In addition, educational and clinical intervention programmes for children with specific language impairment should ensure that they are meeting individual needs.

Language, Cognitive Flexibility, and Explicit False Belief Understanding: Longitudinal Analysis in Typical Development and Specific Language Impairment

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of explicit false belief understanding in 91 English-speaking typically developing children (M age = 61.3 months) and 30 children with specific language impairment (M age = 63.0 months). Concurrent and longitudinal findings converge in supporting a model in which maternal language input predicts the childs memory for false complements, which predicts cognitive flexibility, which in turn predicts explicit false belief understanding.

The short-term memory of profoundly deaf people for words, signs and abstract spatial stimuli

The short-term memory (STM) of 25 deaf and 20 hearing adults fluent in Australian Sign Language (Auslan) was tested using both free- and serial-recall versions of three tasks. On two tasks, where stimuli were presented as either written words or Auslan signs, hearing subjects performed significantly better than deaf subjects. This difference was attributed to the facility of the hearing subjects in translating these two classes of language-based stimuli into phonological codes, which have a preferred status in STM. On the third, language-free task, which was an adaptation of the Corsi Blocks test, the deaf and hearing subjects performed at comparable levels, indicating that differences in their STM became evident only with the introduction of language-based factors. Analyses restricted to the deaf subjects showed that performances on the language-based STM tasks correlated positively with scores on a reading comprehension test. Also, deaf subjects who reported an oral education outperformed their counterparts, who reported a total communication (oral plus signed English) education on the language-based STM tasks. Thus, for this diverse adult deaf sample, proficiency in STM for language-based material, skill in reading, and report of an oral rather than total communication education appear to covary.

Visual and auditory processing and component reading skills in developmental dyslexia

Previous research suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have low-level visual and auditory deficits. The present study further examines these proposed deficits and how they relate to component reading skills. Children with dyslexia and control children were administered measures of visual and auditory processing and a battery of reading tasks, including nonword and irregular-word reading, as measures of phonological and orthographic skills. Significant group differences were found on all visual and auditory tasks. However, at an individual level only a minority of dyslexics had visual and auditory deficits. In both dyslexics and controls, visual processing was not related to component reading skills, while weak associations were found between auditory processing and phonological decoding skills. The results of the present study suggest that dyslexia is not characterized by core deficits in visual and auditory processing. The results are discussed in terms of a general nonsensory problem with task completion.

No differential attentional blink in dyslexia after controlling for baseline sensitivity

Previous research has associated a prolonged attentional blink (AB) with adult dyslexia [Hari, R., Valta, M., & Uutela, K. (1999). Prolonged attentional dwell time in dyslexic adults. Neuroscience Letters, 271, 202-204]. The AB represents a limitation in temporal information processing, estimated as the time interval between two targets necessary for accurate recall (e.g., [Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. (1992). Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, 849-860]). Utilizing single- and dual-target procedures, this investigation extended upon previous research. When controlling for baseline sensitivity as estimated in the dual-target condition, there was no significant difference between dyslexic and control performance. Finding no evidence of a single-target task difference or prolonged AB effect in dyslexia, it is suggested that baseline sensitivity differences relate to difficulties with task demands in dyslexic readers.

Utility of brief teacher rating scales to identify children with educational problems

Abstract The study aimed to determine the utility of teacher ratings of childrens behaviour, oral language, and literacy skills in identifying children with educational problems, and to examine the relationship between behaviour, oral language, and literacy skills. Teacher ratings were obtained for a cohort of Year 2 pupils (N = 129, mean age = 7.3 years, SD =.33) from five schools in Western Australia, using three brief screening questionnaires. To determine the sensitivity and specificity of the screening instruments in identifying children with educational problems as determined by psychometric criteria, direct psychometric assessment of oral language, vocabulary, reading, and spelling was conducted for a subset of the children. Teacher ratings of language, literacy, and behaviour correlated significantly with the standardised test scores. The screening instruments for language and literacy had reasonable sensitivity (74%) and specificity (92%), but a fairly high rate of false negatives (26%) and rela...

A spotlight on preschool: the influence of family factors on children's early literacy skills.

Rationale Phonological awareness, letter knowledge, oral language (including sentence recall) and rapid automatised naming are acknowledged within-child predictors of literacy development. Separate research has identified family factors including socio-economic status, parents’ level of education and family history. However, both approaches have left unexplained significant amounts of variance in literacy outcomes. This longitudinal study sought to improve prospective classification accuracy for young children at risk of literacy failure by adding two new family measures (parents’ phonological awareness and parents’ perceived self-efficacy), and then combining the within-child and family factors. Method Pre-literacy skills were measured in 102 four year olds (46 girls and 56 boys) at the beginning of Preschool, and then at the beginning and end of Kindergarten, when rapid automatised naming was also measured. Family factors data were collected at the beginning of Preschool, and children’s literacy outcomes were measured at the end of Year 1 (age 6–7 years). Results Children from high-risk backgrounds showed poorer literacy outcomes than low-risk students, though three family factors (school socio-economic status, parents’ phonological awareness, and family history) typically accounted for less Year 1 variance than the within-child factors. Combining these family factors with the end of Kindergarten within-child factors provided the most accurate classification (i.e., sensitivity = .85; specificity = .90; overall correct = .88). Implications Our approach would identify at-risk children for intervention before they began to fail. Moreover, it would be cost-effective because although few at-risk children would be missed, allocation of unnecessary educational resources would be minimised.

Relational aggression in an Australian sample: Gender and age differences

Relational aggression is a form of aggression in which individuals use relationships as a source of control and a means by which to inflict harm on others. The present research investigated this form of aggression in 363 children from both primary and high schools (157 third and fourth graders, 207 ninth and 10th graders). Participants were classified as relationally aggressive, overtly aggressive, relationally plus overtly aggressive, or non-aggressive on the basis of a peer nomination instrument. A hypothetical situation instrument that assessed attributions of intent and feelings of distress for ambiguous situations was also completed. Gender and age differences in the expression of relational and overt aggression were observed. In contrast with previous research (Crick, 1995), relationally aggressive children did not display a hostile attribution bias or report more upset feelings specific to relational hypothetical situations. Implications for the social information processing model of aggression and future studies of relational aggression are discussed.