Morag Donaldson

Dog Bite Prevention: Effect of a Short Educational Intervention for Preschool Children

This study aimed to investigate whether preschool children can learn how to interpret dogs’ behaviours, with the purpose of helping avoid dog bites. Three- to five-year-old children (N = 70) were tested on their ability to answer questions about dogs’ emotional states before and after participating in either an educational intervention about dog behaviour (intervention group) or an activity about wild animals (control group). Children who had received training about dog behaviour (intervention group) were significantly better at judging the dogs’ emotional states after the intervention compared to before. The frequency with which they referred to relevant behaviours in justifying their judgements also increased significantly. In contrast, the control group’s performance did not differ significantly between the two testing times. These results indicate that preschool children can be taught how to correctly interpret dogs’ behaviours. This implies that incorporating such training into prevention programmes may contribute to reducing dog bite incidents.

Causal sentence production in children with language impairments.

BACKGROUND The production of causal sentences (e.g. The house went on fire because the girl was playing with matches) is a key component of the ability to produce explanations, which in turn is an important aspect of childrens developing discourse skills. While informal observations by professionals suggest that children with language impairments often have difficulties in producing (and comprehending) causal sentences, there is a dearth of systematic research evidence on the scope and characteristics of such difficulties. AIMS The study reported herein aimed to establish the scope and characteristics of the difficulties that children with language impairments have with causal sentence production. In particular, it investigated whether they have difficulties with (1) producing causal connectives (because and so), (2) producing semantically appropriate causal sentences, and (3) coordinating the production of more than one clause. METHODS & PROCEDURES The performance of 5-7-year-old children with language impairments (the LI group, n = 30) was compared with that of typically developing chronological age peers (the CA group, n = 30) on four elicited production tasks designed to encourage children to talk about pictures of causally related events. The tasks required the children to answer causal questions, to complete and imitate causal sentences, and to produce full causal sentences. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Although the groups did not differ in the overall frequency with which they used causal connectives, the LI group produced fewer causal connectives than the CA group on tasks involving higher processing demands, as well as producing a lower percentage of semantically appropriate responses on most tasks. The LI group found imitating causal sentences more difficult than answering causal questions and completing causal sentences, whereas the CA group showed a similar level of performance across these three tasks. CONCLUSIONS Although 5-7-year-old children with language impairments have causal expressions in their repertoire, they have marked and extensive problems in using these expressions appropriately and in producing full causal sentences even when these are modelled for them. Given the educational importance of explanation, there is a clear need for interventions to target both the semantic appropriateness of causal sentence production and the frequency of use of causal connectives, especially in contexts where children have to cope with the additional processing demands associated with producing two-clause sentences and/or with producing causal sentences autonomously.

Contextual influences on children's spoken and written explanations

The relative influences of medium and context variables were investigated by comparing 7- and 8-year-old childrens spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. In the story task, performance in a “purpose” condition (which provided a specific communicative purpose for the production of an explanation) was compared with performance in a “neutral” condition. The frequency of explanations containing correct causal expressions was significantly higher in the purpose condition than in the neutral condition and significantly lower in the story task than in the three more structured tasks. In contrast to these contextual influences, performance in the written medium was very similar to performance in the spoken medium.

The effectiveness of therapy for child phonological disorder: the metaphon approach

Brown, W.S. & Goldberg, D.M. (1990). An acoustic study of the intelligible utterances of the hearing impaired. Folia Phoniatrica, 42, 230-238. Kenstowicz, M. (1994). Phonology in Generative Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell). Romani, C. (1992). Are there distinct input and output buffers? Language and Cognitive Processes, 7, 133-62. Van Riper, C. (1973). The Nature of Stuttering (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall).

Children's production of verb-phrase anaphora in a spoken task.

To investigate the influence of semantic/pragmatic variables on childrens production of verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), a spoken sentence completion task (e.g., John is throwing a ball and ... Mary is too) was administered to four-, seven- and ten-year-olds. The frequency of VPA production was affected by whether the two clauses had the same or different polarity and by whether the actions were portrayed as simultaneous or sequential. These effects interacted in complex ways with age and with the presentation order of the polarity types. We speculate that developmental changes in the influence of semantic/pragmatic factors may be linked to increases with age in the strength of syntactic priming effects.

Children’s Comprehension and Production of Locative Expressions

Extracts from the transcribed material highlight certain features. In the child/child setting these include: a strong sense of excitement creating a need to communicate findings, the co-ordination of activities, the use of questions, evidence of role-playing, in particular that of the group leader/ expert, and the manoeuvres of rejected participants wishing to regain entry. The effect of the adult joining the group led to changes in conversation direction and balance and these are examined in relation to the peer group interaction.

Developmental relationships between speech and writing: Is verb-phrase anaphora production a special case?

BACKGROUND Young childrens speech is typically more linguistically sophisticated than their writing. However, there are grounds for asking whether production of cohesive devices, such as verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), might represent an exception to this developmental pattern, as cohesive devices are generally more important in writing than in speech and so might be expected to be more frequent in childrens writing than in their speech. AIMS The study reported herein aims to compare the frequency of childrens production of VPA constructions (e.g., Mary is eating an apple and so is John) between a written and a spoken task. SAMPLE Forty-eight children participated from each of two age groups: 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds. METHODS All the children received both a spoken and a written sentence completion task designed to elicit production of VPA. Task order was counterbalanced. RESULTS VPA production was significantly more frequent in speech than in writing and when the spoken task was presented first. Surprisingly, the 7-year-olds produced VPA constructions more frequently than the 10-year-olds. CONCLUSIONS Despite the greater importance of cohesion in writing than in speech, childrens production of VPA is similar to their production of most other aspects of language in that more sophisticated constructions are used more frequently in speech than in writing. Childrens written production of cohesive devices could probably be enhanced by presenting spoken tasks immediately before written tasks. The lower frequency of VPA production in the older children may reflect syntactic priming effects or a belief that they should produce sentences that are as fully specified as possible.

Young children's production of causal connectives

Scottish mothers and children the Japanese dyads solved the problem just as fast on average. Further, more detailed analysis showed that for all verbal categories related to the speedy and successful solving of the puzzle, Scottish mothers were not significantly higher than Japanese. However, the Scottish mothers made more comments irrelevant to the solving of the problem, as well as praising and criticizing more. Similar behaviour differences concerning verbalization were also found between the Japanese and the Scottish children.

Can children with developmental language disorder explain actions in terms of intentions

This study aimed to establish whether 5- to 7-year-old children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties explaining actions in terms of intentions and if so, to elucidate the nature of such difficulties. Children with DLD and typically developing chronological age peers (TD group) participated in a production task designed to elicit ‘intentional mode’ explanations (e.g. The girl put a spider in the bed because she wanted to give the boy a fright). The DLD group produced significantly fewer well-formed intentional mode explanations than the TD group, made significantly fewer attempts at producing these explanations, and used a more restricted range of linguistic constructions. However, almost all the children with DLD made at least occasional attempts at producing intentional mode explanations. These findings imply that although children with DLD are likely to require support with the socially important task of explaining actions in terms of intentions, there is a foundation on which intervention and classroom practice can build.

Linguistic awareness in young children with phonological disorder

computational model of child language data, in order to overcome the potential obstacles highlighted by both parties. The paper summarizes briefly the principles outlined by Edwards and the comments of MacWhinney & Snow, before proceeding to examine the merit of applying formal computational data modelling techniques to the field of child language data archival. We finish the paper with examples of the use of relational database modelling in restricted child language domains, in order to highlight the benefits of computational data modelling.