Paula Lyytinen

Brain Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) Measured at Birth Predict Later Language Development in Children with and Without Familial Risk for Dyslexia

We report associations between brain event-related potentials (ERPs) measured from newborns with and without familial risk for dyslexia and these same childrens later language and verbal memory skills at 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years of age. ERPs to synthetic consonant-vowel syllables (/ba/, /da/, /ga/; presented equiprobably with 3,910-7,285 msec interstimulus intervals) were recorded from 26 newborns at risk for familial dyslexia and 23 control infants participating in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The correlation and regression analyses showed that the at-risk type of response pattern at birth (a slower shift in polarity from positivity to negativity in responses to /ga/ at 540-630 msec) in the right hemisphere was related to significantly poorer receptive language skills across both groups at the age of 2.5 years. The similar ERP pattern in the left hemisphere was associated with poorer verbal memory skills at the age of 5 years. These results demonstrate that ERPs of newborns may be valid predictors of later language and neurocognitive outcomes.

Developmental pathways of children with and without familial risk for dyslexia during the first years of life.

Comparisons of the developmental pathways of the first 5 years of life for children with (N = 107) and without (N = 93) familial risk for dyslexia observed in the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal study of Dyslexia are reviewed. The earliest differences between groups were found at the ages of a few days and at 6 months in brain event-related potential responses to speech sounds and in head-turn responses (at 6 months), conditioned to reflect categorical perception of speech stimuli. The development of vocalization and motor behavior, based on parental report of the time of reaching significant milestones, or the growth of vocabulary (using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories) failed to reveal differences before age 2. Similarly, no group differences were found in cognitive and language development assessed by the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and the Reynell Developmental Language Scales before age 2.5. The earliest language measure that showed lower scores among the at-risk group was maximum sentence length at age 2. Early gross motor development had higher correlation to later language skills among the at-risk group rather than the control children. The most consistent predictor of differential development between groups was the onset of talking. Children who were identified as late talkers at age 2 were still delayed at the age 3.5 in most features of language-related skills-but only if they belonged to the group at familial risk for dyslexia. Several phonological and naming measures known to correlate with reading from preschool age differentiated the groups consistently from age 3.5. Our findings imply that a marked proportion of children at familial risk for dyslexia follow atypical neurodevelopmental paths. The signs listed previously comprise a pool of candidates for early predictors and precursors of dyslexia, which await validation.

Language development, literacy skills and predictive connections to reading in Finnish children with and without familial risk for dyslexia

Discriminative language markers and predictive links between early language and literacy skills were investigated retrospectively in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia in which children at familial risk for dyslexia have been followed from birth. Three groups were formed on the basis of 198 children’s reading and spelling status. One group of children with reading disability (RD; n = 46) and two groups of typical readers from nondyslexic control (TRC; n = 84) and dyslexic families (TRD; n = 68) were examined from age 1.5 years to school age. The RD group was outperformed by typical readers on numerous language and literacy measures (expressive and receptive language, morphology, phonological sensitivity, RAN, and letter knowledge) from 2 years of age onward. The strongest predictive links emerged from receptive and expressive language to reading via measures of letter naming, rapid naming, morphology, and phonological awareness.

A cross-linguistic perspective on the development of temporal systems

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the development of temporal location within a cross-linguistic experimental design. The research focused on the transition from a temporal system based on absolute temporal relation involving speech time and event time to a more complex system involving relative temporal relationships and reference time. A comprehension test was constructed with problems which were diagnostic of two salient distinctions within each of three temporal systems. The procedure was based on a two-choice sentence-picture matching task. The children who participated were from Poland, the USA and Finland, and there were 12 children at each of the following age levels: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6, and 6;6. The Polish and American children solved problems requiring absolute temporal location at 2;6, and the older children eventually solved most of the problems requiring relative location. The Finnish children followed a different pattern taking longer to comprehend both types of problems. A second experiment confirmed the Finnish pattern of development. The results of the comprehension test were compared to observations of conversational and narrative discourse which were the product of two elicitation procedures. The research demonstrates the way in which conceptual development places a universal constraint on the developmental process and how the specific properties of individual languages also have an effect.

Parental Contribution to Child's Early Language and Interest in Books.

The relationships between parents’ age, education, literacy activities and shared reading with the child and children’s language skills and early interest in books were examined in a longitudinal study of 108 children. Parents reported on their children’s lexical and grammatical development by using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (the CDIs) at the ages of 14 and 24 months. The Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to the children in a laboratory setting at 24 months. Information on parental background variables was obtained through a questionnaire before the children’s birth. Book reading habits were inquired when the children were 2 years of age. Mothers’ education, literacy activities and shared reading with the child were shown to be more strongly associated with the 2-year-olds’ lexical and grammatical skills than were those of father. A corresponding association to parental background variables emerged regardless of whether parental report data or scores on the structured test were employed as the child language measure. Shared reading with the father was found to be linked to children’s early interest in books. The children who exhibited greater interest in books were likely to be read to by mothers and fathers more frequently than other children. These children also had larger vocabularies than did children with low interest in books. The role of endogenous and exogenous variables in explaining children’s language skills and early book reading interest are discussed.RésuméLes liens entre, d’une part, l’âge des parents, leur niveau de formation, leurs activités en matière d’alphabétisation et les moments de lecture partagés avec l’enfant et, d’autre part, les aptitudes langagières des enfants et leur intérêt précoce pour les livres ont été examinés dans une étude longitudinale portant sur 108 enfants. Les parents ont fait un compte rendu sur le développement lexical et grammatical de leurs enfants en utilisant les Inventaires de développement communicationnel (Communicative Development Inventories, CDI) de MacArthur, à l’âge de 14 et de 24 mois. L’échelle de développement infantile de Bayley a été appliquée aux enfants dans des conditions de laboratoire à l’âge de 24 mois. Des renseignements sur les paramètres du milieu parental ont été recueillis par voie de questionnaire avant la naissance de l’enfant. Il a été dressé un relevé des habitudes de lecture de livres une fois que les enfants ont atteint l’âge de deux ans. Il ressort que le niveau de formation de la mère, ses activités en matière d’alphabétisation de l’enfant et les moments de lecture en commun avec l’enfant sont plus fortement assiociés avec les aptitudes lexicales et grammaticales de l’enfant de deux ans qui’ils ne le sont pour le père. Il peut être mis en évidence un lien concordant avec les paramètres du milieu parental indépendants de la méthode d’évaluation du langage chez l’enfant — compte rendu des parents ou notes obtenues au test structuré. La probabilité que les enfants témoignant d’un plus grand intérêt pour les livres soient des enfants à qui la mère ou le père ont fait de la lecture est plus grande que chez les autres enfants. Ces enfants avaient également un vocabulaire plus développé que les enfants témoignant d’un moindre intérêt pour les livres. Le rôle des variables endogènes et exogènes dans l’explication des aptitudes langagières des enfants et de leur intérêt précoce pour les livres fait l’objet d’une discussion.

Early motor development and later language and reading skills in children at risk of familial dyslexia

Relationships between early motor development and language and reading skills were studied in 154 children, of whom 75 had familial risk of dyslexia (37 females, 38 males; at‐risk group) and 79 constituted a control group (32 females, 47 males). Motor development was assessed by a structured parental questionnaire during the childs first year of life. Vocabulary and inflectional morphology skills were used as early indicators of language skills at 3 years 6 months and 5 years or 5 years 6 months of age, and reading speed was used as a later indicator of reading skills at 7 years of age. The same subgroups as in our earlier study (in which the cluster analysis was described) were used in this study. The three subgroups of the control group were ‘fast motor development’, ‘slow fine motor development’, and ‘slow gross motor development’, and the two subgroups of the at‐risk group were ‘slow motor development’ and ‘fast motor development’. A significant difference was found between the development of expressive language skills. Children with familial risk of dyslexia and slow motor development had a smaller vocabulary with poorer inflectional skills than the other children. They were also slower in their reading speed at the end of the first grade at the age of 7 years. Two different associations are discussed, namely the connection between early motor development and language development, and the connection between early motor development and reading speed.

The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study

The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language-thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experimental to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the childrens capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-referential location involves a single referent object/event with intrinsic properties (e.g. in/on or past/non-past), and bi-referential location requires two or more referent objects/events and relative perspective (e.g. deictic front/back or before/after). The conceptual and linguistic tests revealed significant changes during the period from two to five years of age, and measures of conceptual development were correlated with measures of linguistic development. As spatial and temporal representations became more structured, children were able to move from mono- to bi-referential location. In a comprehension test, we discovered an interaction of language by dimension. Finnish children found spatial distinctions relatively easy and Polish children found temporal distinctions relatively easy. This interaction was expected on the basis of the relative complexity of the morpho-syntactic coding in the spatial and temporal systems of the two languages. However, the argument relating the timing of acquisition to the transparency versus opacity of the linguistic systems was not supported by the English language comparison. Finally, the Finnish children were relatively better able to accomplish the spatial conceptual tasks as compared to the Polish children. This finding is consistent with a developmental concept of linguistic relativity. In general, the research indicates that spatial and temporal linguistic systems and representational knowledge interact during development with the influence occurring in both directions.

Language and Symbolic Play in Toddlers

Language-play relations were examined in 110 18-month-old toddlers by observing their play actions in the Symbolic Play Test and assessing their language skills with the CDI parental report and the Reynell Developmental Language Scales. Significant associations between both language comprehension and production (vocabulary, use of suffixes, utterance length) and play were found when percentage of symbolic play was used as the measure of play competence. The total play score which included both functional-relational toy manipulation and symbolic play was not as strongly associated with the language measures. In both play measures relations were, however, higher between play and language comprehension than between play and language production. Out of the symbolic play categories other-directed pretence discriminated children’s play best. The relation between language and play was also supported by a subgroup analysis which showed that early talkers displayed significantly more symbolic play than late talkers. Children belonging to the latter group had a small productive vocabulary and they did not yet exhibit any sentence combinations or grammatical suffixes. The total play score correlated significantly with language comprehension among late talkers, whereas a significant connection was found between language comprehension and percentage of symbolic play among early talkers. Methodological issues concerning the assessment of toddlers’ play will be discussed.

Shared reading interaction in families with and without genetic risk for dyslexia: implications for toddlers’ language development

Shared reading represents a unique context for language learning. Little is known, however, about the quality of shared reading and its developmental implications in families with reading disabilities. In the present study, these questions were addressed in the context of a longitudinal follow-up. Maternal interactional behaviors and childrens participation in a book reading situation were analyzed at 14 months of age in a subsample involving 39 mothers who were diagnosed as reading disabled and had a familial background of reading difficulties (the RD group) and 89 normally reading mothers (the NR group) and their children. Information on the childrens concurrent and subsequent vocabulary comprehension and production was obtained at 14 and 18 months. The results indicated that the children who displayed a high interest and engagement in shared reading at 14 months had more advanced language skills 4 months later. Also found was support for a link between maternal strategies and childrens subsequent vocabulary comprehension and production. In accordance with the literature, maternal activation was more strongly related to the childrens language development than the mere describing of the elements in the book. No differences emerged between the NR and RD groups in the frequencies of maternal interactional behaviors, childrens participation in shared reading, or their language skills at this early age; maternal orienting of the childrens attention was, however, found to be positively related to later language development in the NR group, while in the RD group the association was negative. Copyright

Parents as Informants of Their Child's Vocal and Early Language Development.

Continuity in vocalization and language development was examined in the longitudinal study of 94 children. Parents observed their infants vocal development with the help of a checklist during the first year of life and reported their lexical development by using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (the CDIs) at the ages of 14 and 18 months. The Reynell Developmental Language Scales (the RDLS) were administered to the children in a laboratory setting at 18 months. The vocalization checklist revealed milestones of sound production which parents reported reliably and which were significantly related to the childs later language development. The continuity in vocal and language development was supported by a subgroup analysis, which showed that the early vocalizers had comprehended and produced significantly more words and suffixes than had the late vocalizers during the second year. The results also provided support to the concurrent and predictive validity of the CDIs. Significant correlat...