Maja Roch

A comparison between word and nonword reading in Down syndrome: the role of phonological awareness.

UNLABELLED In order to examine whether any observed relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability in Down syndrome reflects the typical use of a phonologically based approach to reading, 12 children and young adults with Down syndrome were assessed for reading and phonological awareness skills. They were compared to a control group of 14 typically developing 6- and 7-year-olds of comparable word reading abilities. Results showed that, although individuals with Down syndrome had impaired nonword reading and phonological awareness skills, the same relationship held between these two abilities as was observed in the group of typically developing children. Moreover, individuals with Down syndrome read at least as well as the typically developing children when the task required a visual reading strategy (reading irregular words). LEARNING OUTCOMES (a) understanding of the main issues related to the development of reading skills in Down syndrome; (b) understanding of the role played by phonological awareness in learning to read; (c) understanding of the importance for education of the strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in Down syndrome.

Listening comprehension in preschoolers: The role of memory

The current study analyzed the relationship between text comprehension and memory skills in preschoolers. We were interested in verifying the hypothesis that memory is a specific contributor to listening comprehension in preschool children after controlling for verbal abilities. We were also interested in analyzing the developmental path of the relationship between memory skills and listening comprehension in the age range considered. Forty-four, 4-year-olds (mean age = 4 years and 6 months, SD = 4 months) and 40, 5-year-olds (mean age = 5 years and 4 months, SD = 5 months) participated in the study. The children were administered measures to evaluate listening comprehension ability (story comprehension), short-term and working memory skills (forward and backward word span), verbal intelligence and receptive vocabulary. Results showed that both short-term and working memory predicted unique and independent variance in listening comprehension after controlling for verbal abilities, with working memory explaining additional variance over and above short-term memory. The predictive power of memory skills was stable in the age range considered. Results also confirm a strong relation between verbal abilities and listening comprehension in 4- and 5-year-old children.

The relationship between listening comprehension of text and sentences in preschoolers: Specific or mediated by lower and higher level components?

Two studies explored the relation between listening comprehension of text and listening comprehension of sentences in preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years, 11 months. The first study analyzed this relationship taking into account the role of lower level components, namely, word knowledge and verbal working memory, as possible mediators. These components specifically accounted for listening text comprehension, whereas sentence comprehension did not. Given that sentences forming a text are not processed in isolation but in context, the second study explored the role of the ability to use linguistic context, a higher level component, in listening comprehension of text and sentences. Listening sentence comprehension was facilitated by the use of context, which accounted for individual differences in listening text comprehension. Overall, results showed that listening text comprehension is related to lower level as well as higher level components, whereas listening sentence comprehension does not play a specific role.

A longitudinal study of idiom and text comprehension.

The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related to idiom comprehension than sentence comprehension. The follow-up study, carried out eight months later on less-skilled text comprehenders, investigated whether an improvement in text comprehension was paralleled by an improvement in idiom comprehension. The development of sentence comprehension was also taken into account. Children who improved in text comprehension also improved in idiom comprehension; this improvement was, instead, weakly related to an improvement in sentence comprehension. The relationship between text and idiom comprehension is discussed in the light of the Global Elaboration Model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995).

Text comprehension in Down syndrome: The role of lower and higher level abilities

The contribution of lower level linguistic abilities (study 1) and a higher level capacity, namely the use of context, (study 2), on text comprehension was studied. Participants were 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged between aged between 8 years 11 months and 16 years 10 months, and 16 children with typical development, aged between 5 years 11 months and 7 years 3 months, matched for the level of text comprehension. In study 1 the two groups were compared for receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension: both of them were shown to play a role in text comprehension in Down syndrome. Since participants with Down syndrome had very low scores in sentence comprehension, study 2 tested the hypothesis that when sentences were presented within a brief context, individuals with Down syndrome would perform better. This hypothesis was confirmed and it was shown that contextual facilitation was closely related to text comprehension skills.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters’ social or language status, but not with the raters’ age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

A Follow-Up Study on Word and Non-Word Reading Skills in Down Syndrome.

UNLABELLED The current study was designed to trace changes in the relationship between non-word reading and irregular word reading on the one hand, and between phonological awareness and non-word reading on the other, through a follow-up study of a group of individuals with Down syndrome. Twelve individuals with Down syndrome, whose data were originally reported in Roch and Jarrold (2008), were seen four years later, and were given the same tasks as in the previous study evaluating phonological awareness, non-word reading and irregular word reading. After four years, an improvement was observed in all the skills of interest. Furthermore, the pattern of relationships among the three skills was observed to change considerably across the four year period. At the first time point, a weak association between non-word and irregular word reading was found, but there was a strong association between these two measures at the second time point. In contrast, a strong relationship was found at Time 1 between non-word reading and phonological awareness, which became weaker at Time 2. Longitudinal associations between the three skills were also examined in order to explain this changing pattern of associations. The results indicated that the ability to decode non-words plays a marginal role on later irregular word reading. In contrast, irregular word reading is a longitudinal predictor of later non-word reading. Phonological awareness was not longitudinally related to non-word reading. The results indicate that developing word knowledge can facilitate later non-word reading in Down syndrome, perhaps by a process of reading by visual analogy to known lexical items. LEARNING OUTCOMES Readers will be able to (a) explain the development of word reading, non-word reading and phonological awareness in Down syndrome; (b) explain the longitudinal changes in the relationships among the three skills; (c) explain the relevance for education of the influence of word reading for the improvement in non-word reading.

Narrative competence of Italian-English bilingual children between 5 and 7 years

The study explored narrative production and comprehension in typically developing Italian–English sequential bilinguals. Thirty 5- to 6-year-olds and 32 6- to 7-year-olds were presented with story telling and retelling tasks, each followed by comprehension questions in Italian (their first language) and English (their second language). The macrostructure of narratives produced was analyzed, considering total amount of relevant information, story complexity, and mental state terms. Comprehension questions focused on implicit story information (i.e., characters’ mental states and goals). The results indicated that (a) older children outperformed younger ones on all measures; (b) an advantage of first language (Italian) over second language (English) emerged for younger children; and (c) comprehension and production were both more accurate in story retelling than in telling. Theoretical and methodological implications of these results are discussed.

The Advantage of Reading over Listening Text Comprehension in Down Syndrome: What Is the Role of Verbal Memory?.

The current study was designed to investigate the role played by verbal memory in the advantage shown by individuals with Down syndrome in reading over listening text comprehension (Roch & Levorato, 2009). Two different aspects of verbal memory were analyzed: processing load and coding modality. Participants were 20 individuals with Down syndrome, aged between 11 and 26 years who were matched for reading comprehension with a group of 20 typically developing children aged between 6;3 and 7;3 years. The two groups were presented with a listening comprehension test and four verbal memory tasks in which the degree of processing load and the coding modality were manipulated. The results of the study confirmed the advantage of reading over listening comprehension for individuals with Down syndrome. Furthermore, it emerged that different aspects of verbal memory were related respectively to reading and to listening comprehension: visual memory with low processing load was related to the former and oral memory with high processing load to the latter. Finally, it was demonstrated that verbal memory contributed to explain the advantage of reading over listening comprehension in Down syndrome. The results are discussed in light of their theoretical relevance and practical implications.

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

ABSTRACT This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.