Jonathan Nakamoto

Popularity, Social Acceptance, and Aggression in Adolescent Peer Groups: Links with Academic Performance and School Attendance

This article reports a short-term longitudinal study focusing on popularity and social acceptance as predictors of academic engagement for a sample of 342 adolescents (approximate average age of 14). These youths were followed for 4 consecutive semesters. Popularity, social acceptance, and aggression were assessed with a peer nomination inventory, and data on academic engagement were obtained from school records. For adolescents who were highly aggressive, increases in popularity were associated with increases in unexplained absences and decreases in grade point average. Conversely, changes in social acceptance were not predictive of changes in grade point average or unexplained absences. These results highlight the importance of multidimensional conceptualizations of social standing for research on school adjustment during adolescence and emphasize the potential risks associated with popularity.

A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of English Language Learners' Reading Comprehension in English and Spanish

This study investigated the associations of oral language and reading skills with a sample of 282 Spanish-speaking English language learners across 3 years of elementary school. In the 3rd grade, the English and Spanish decoding measures formed two distinct but highly related factors, and the English and Spanish oral language measures formed two factors that showed a small positive correlation between them. The decoding and oral language factors were used to predict the samples English and Spanish reading comprehension in the 6th grade. The decoding and oral language factors were both significant predictors of reading comprehension in both languages. The within-language effects were larger than the cross-language effects and the cross-language effects were not significant after accounting for the within-language effects.

Developmental trajectories of preschool early literacy skills: a comparison of language-minority and monolingual-English children.

This study utilized latent growth-curve analyses to determine if the early literacy skills of children who were Spanish-speaking language-minority (LM) followed a similar quantitative growth profile over a preschool year as that of a group of children from a comparable socioeconomic (SES) background but who were not LM. Participants, who ranged in age from 37 to 60 months (M = 50.73; SD = 5.04), included 540 Spanish-speaking LM and 408 non-LM children (47% girls) who were enrolled in 30 Head Start classrooms. Scores on a measure of oral language and measures of code-related skills (i.e., phonological awareness, print knowledge) were lower for LM children than for non-LM children. LM children experienced significantly faster growth in oral language skills than did non-LM children. Growth for print knowledge and blending was similar for LM and non-LM children, whereas LM children experienced slightly less growth than non-LM children on elision. The inclusion of child (i.e., initial language scores, age, nonverbal cognitive ability) and family (i.e., maternal/paternal education, 2-parent household, father employment) variables eliminated initial differences between LM and non-LM children on the code-related variables, and the effect was due primarily to childrens initial oral language skills. These results indicate that the early risk for reading-related problems experienced by Spanish-speaking LM children is due both to low SES and to their LM status, and they highlight the critical need for the development, evaluation, and deployment of early instructional programs for LM children with limited English oral language proficiency.

Perception of coarticulation in gated words by dyslexic and non‐dyslexic children

In an auditory word gating task, listeners are presented with portions of words, and try to identify these acoustic fragments as lexical items. It has been shown that children need more acoustic information than adults to succeed, and that dyslexic children can require more information than other children. It is also known that adults can use early acoustic cues to identify features of upcoming segments. For example, in English anticipatory vowel nasalization implies that a nasal consonant will follow, and similarly anticipatory lateralization. Our study asked whether dyslexic children are impaired in their perception or use of such anticipatory coarticulatory information. Successive gates from test words that ended in a nasal (8 words) or /l/ (4 words), or control words with final oral stops, were blocked by length and presented to 26 dyslexic and 26 non‐dyslexic children. Responses were audiorecorded and later transcribed; responses were scored re both the full word and the nasality/laterality of the fi...