Strategies For Early Childhood Education And Instructions Assignment In two to three paragraphs please: choose one of the four reading/writing stages (emer

Strategies For Early Childhood Education And Instructions Assignment In two to three paragraphs please: choose one of the four reading/writing stages (emergent, beginning, transitional, intermediate/advanced) and describe the layers of the orthography, providing practical applications as supported through the course materials. I’ve attached the readings for this week. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 56:8 (2015), pp 848–856
doi:10.1111/jcpp.12378
Do infant vocabulary skills predict school-age
language and literacy outcomes?
Fiona J. Duff, Gurpreet Reen, Kim Plunkett, and Kate Nation
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Background: Strong associations between infant vocabulary and school-age language and literacy skills would have
important practical and theoretical implications: Preschool assessment of vocabulary skills could be used to identify
children at risk of reading and language difficulties, and vocabulary could be viewed as a cognitive foundation for
reading. However, evidence to date suggests predictive ability from infant vocabulary to later language and literacy is
low. This study provides an investigation into, and interpretation of, the magnitude of such infant to school-age
relationships. Methods: Three hundred British infants whose vocabularies were assessed by parent report in the
2nd year of life (between 16 and 24 months) were followed up on average 5 years later (ages ranged from 4 to 9 years),
when their vocabulary, phonological and reading skills were measured. Results: Structural equation modelling of
age-regressed scores was used to assess the strength of longitudinal relationships. Infant vocabulary (a latent factor
of receptive and expressive vocabulary) was a statistically significant predictor of later vocabulary, phonological
awareness, reading accuracy and reading comprehension (accounting for between 4% and 18% of variance). Family
risk for language or literacy difficulties explained additional variance in reading (approximately 10%) but not
language outcomes. Conclusions: Significant longitudinal relationships between preliteracy vocabulary knowledge
and subsequent reading support the theory that vocabulary is a cognitive foundation of both reading accuracy and
reading comprehension. Importantly however, the stability of vocabulary skills from infancy to later childhood is too
low to be sufficiently predictive of language outcomes at an individual level – a finding that fits well with the
observation that the majority of ‘late talkers’ resolve their early language difficulties. For reading outcomes,
prediction of future difficulties is likely to be improved when considering family history of language/literacy
difficulties alongside infant vocabulary levels. Keywords: Infancy, language, reading, longitudinal studies, family
history.
Introduction
This paper sets out to answer the question of
whether infant vocabulary – as measured by parental report during the 2nd year of life – predicts
school-age language and literacy outcomes. This is a
research question of both practical and theoretical
import.
The first word that a child utters represents an
important milestone in development. Parents take
great delight at the advent of their child’s speech,
and express significant concern if this seems
delayed. As noted by Paul and Roth (2011), a child’s
failure to acquire their first spoken words, in the
absence of any explanatory syndrome, is the most
common reason for referral for early intervention
(American Speech-Language Hearing Association,
2006). Such factors feed into a drive for early
assessment of language abilities and early identification of language difficulties – especially in a milieu
which emphasises the importance of early intervention (e.g. Allen, 2011; Bercow, 2008). Regarding
child language development, a question to be asked
is whether these hopes and aims can be realised.
There are two main strands of evidence that inform
these issues. The first strand takes a dichotomous
approach and compares the outcomes of late talking
Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.
children with those who showed no such delays. The
second takes a continuous approach and considers
the overall strength of the association between
attainments in infancy and later childhood in an
unselected sample of children.
The term ‘late talkers’ is used to refer to 18- to 35month olds who are slow to develop spoken language
in the absence of any known primary cause (Rescorla, 2011). Various criteria have been used in the
literature to identify late talkers, but the most
common is those children who perform in the lowest
10th percentile for their age on a parental report of
expressive vocabulary (the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) – Fenson
et al., 1994). A review by Rescorla (2011) provides a
comprehensive summary of the late talker literature.
From this, it is clear that the majority of late talkers
resolve their language difficulties by school-age. At
most, late talkers carry a subclinical risk: Although
the language and literacy scores of children who
were late talkers subsequently fall in the average
range, they are oftentimes reported as being significantly below those of their typically developing
peers. Rescorla (2011) also observes that the majority of children who go on to be categorised as having
a language delay were not classified as late talkers in
infancy. This high rate of false positives and false
negatives suggests a lack of stability in language
development from infancy to the school years.
© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, on behalf of Association for Child and
Adolescent Mental Health.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
doi:10.1111/jcpp.12378
This apparent low stability in early language is
supported by findings of studies that have adopted a
continuous approach to exploring the issue. A number of large population-based studies have employed
multifactorial models that incorporate a host of
familial, demographic, perinatal and developmental
measures to predict language outcomes. Reilly et al.
(2010) reported on outcomes of over 1500 Australian
4-year olds whose vocabulary skills had been measured at 2 years. Their multifactorial model with 13
predictors explained 23.6% of variance in receptive
language and 30.1% of variance in expressive language. An arguably low proportion of this variance
(4.7% and 9.5%, respectively) was explained by
children’s earlier language skills (late talking status
at 2 years).
A study of nearly 4000 Dutch infants by Henrichs
et al. (2011) conveys similar findings. Their multifactorial model with 15 predictors could only
account for 17.7% of variance in expressive vocabulary at 30 months. Expressive vocabulary scores at
18 months accounted for 11.5% of the explained
variance. A follow-up report by Ghassabian et al.
(2013) of nearly 3000 of these children at 6 years of
age indicates that predictive ability diminishes over
time. Using a similar set of predictors, 15.2% of
variance in vocabulary comprehension at 6 years
could be accounted for; expressive and receptive
vocabulary skills at 18 months together explained
only 1.8% of the variance, and expressive vocabulary
at 2.5 years explained only 2.0%.
In all, the evidence points more towards discontinuity than continuity of language skills from infancy
to early childhood. This is a disappointing finding
with respect to hopes for early identification and
remediation of language difficulties. However, given
that the discontinuity is not absolute (i.e. infant
vocabulary skills are able to explain some of the
variance in later language, and some late talkers do
show persistent language delay), research has
endeavoured to identify additional factors that might
improve predictability of language outcomes.
A helpful summary of risk factors for persistent
language difficulties is provided by Paul and Roth
(2011) and includes presence of receptive as well as
expressive difficulties, and a family history of language or literacy difficulties (e.g. Bishop et al., 2012;
Ghassabian et al., 2013; Reilly et al., 2010; Zambrana, Pons, Eadie, & Ystrom, 2014). That family
history is a significant predictor of longer term
language delay dovetails well with the fact that
preschool vocabulary skills differentiate between
children with a family history of dyslexia who do
and do not go on to receive a dyslexic diagnosis (e.g.
Scarborough, 1990). This issue will be pursued
further in this study.
Although many studies have investigated the longitudinal relationship from infant vocabulary to later
language skills, far fewer studies have considered
reading as an outcome measure, despite the
Infant vocabulary and school-age outcomes
849
theoretical significance of this association. A critical
line of investigation in the reading research literature
has been to identify the cognitive skills that underpin
the development of reading; that is, to determine
causal pathways. Experimental training studies
provide the only true test of causality. However,
longitudinal correlational studies are an essential
forerunner to these in establishing the ‘logic of
causal order’ (Davis, 1985), insomuch as they can
demonstrate that a cause precedes its effect in time.
With respect to reading, the most informative longitudinal investigations are those wherein a supposed
causal factor is measured before reading has begun
to develop. Infant vocabulary is an ideal measure in
this regard.
Exploration of causal relations, however, must be
set within a clear theoretical framework (Hulme &
Snowling, 2009). We can ask, then: why might
vocabulary be causally related to reading? In their
simple view of reading, Gough and Tunmer (1986)
highlighted the two main components of reading:
reading accuracy (mapping from print to sound) and
reading comprehension (mapping from print to
meaning). It is clear why vocabulary should relate
to comprehension: at the most basic level, the
meaning of a text cannot be understood if the
meanings of its constituent words (vocabulary
knowledge) are not known. In school-age children,
strong evidence for a causal relationship between
vocabulary and reading comprehension has emerged
from longitudinal studies (e.g. Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004) and training studies (e.g.
Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, & Hulme, 2010; Fricke,
Bowyer-Crane, Haley, Hulme, & Snowling, 2013).
The proposed mechanisms by which vocabulary
might influence reading accuracy are more debated.
There is discussion over whether vocabulary affects
reading accuracy directly or indirectly (e.g. Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, &
Poe, 2003). An indirect role is proposed by the lexical
restructuring hypothesis, which suggests that
increased vocabulary knowledge forces a fine-tuning
of phonological representations, in turn facilitating
reading accuracy (Metsala & Walley, 1998). In contrast, the self-teaching hypothesis ascribes vocabulary a direct role in reading accuracy: incorrect
decoding attempts can be corrected if a child has
the target word stored in their spoken vocabulary
(Share, 1995). On this view, vocabulary knowledge
will be more helpful for reading aloud words with
exceptional rather than regular spellings – a prediction in keeping with the triangle model of reading
aloud (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson,
1996). There is certainly some evidence that vocabulary is associated with reading accuracy in schoolage children. For example, variations in vocabulary
knowledge at school age predict variations in later
word reading (Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007);
and children are better at learning to read an
unfamiliar written word if it is already in their
© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, on behalf of Association for
Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
850
Fiona J. Duff et al.
spoken vocabulary (Duff & Hulme, 2012). However,
unequivocal evidence that vocabulary exerts a causal influence on the development of word reading is
still lacking.
In sum, though there is evidence from school-age
children that vocabulary plays a role in the development of reading accuracy and reading comprehension – to varying degrees – evidence of significant
pathways from infant vocabulary skills to school-age
reading outcomes would still serve to strengthen this
knowledge base. Few such studies in nonclinical
samples exist. Lee (2011) tracked over 1000 American infants who had their expressive vocabularies
assessed via the CDI at 24 months. Correlations
with language and literacy skills measured subsequently at 3–11 years were reported. For reading
outcomes, the magnitude of the correlation coefficients varied little as a function of age, yielding
average correlations of r = .23 for word reading
accuracy and r = .27 for passage reading comprehension. Though highly statistically reliable (on
account of the large sample size), these coefficients
reflect small-sized effects (Cohen, 1992). Nonetheless, this was taken as evidence that, ‘expressive
vocabulary at age 2 is. . . crucial to subsequent
literacy development’ (p. 83).
This study aims to address some of the issues
highlighted above through a longitudinal follow-up
of 300 British infants initially assessed in their 2nd
year of life. Specifically, we seek to test whether there
are significant longitudinal relationships between
infant vocabulary and school-age language and
literacy skills and whether considering a child’s
family history can improve prediction over time. This
is the first study to ask these specific questions in
the UK context. We aim to interpret our findings and
their application to theory and practice on the basis
of the magnitude of the observed effects.
Method
Participants
Participants were drawn from a sample of children who had
previously taken part in research at the University of Oxford’s
BabyLab. Ethical approval was granted by the Central University Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford. To
be considered for this study, children needed to have had an
Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (OCDI – see
below) completed at some point between 16 and 24 months of
age (t1), and had to fall between Reception Year (age 4–5) and
Year 4 (age 8–9) at the time of follow-up testing (t2). This
yielded 939 children whose families were contacted by the
research team. Of these, informed parental consent for participation was given for 321 children in 159 different schools in
and around Oxfordshire. In total, 300 children (159 boys)
completed the follow-up assessment. The mean age of the
sample was 6;09 (1;03), with a range of 4;05 to 9;05. The
number of children in each age group was as follows: age 4 = 1,
age 5 = 64, age 6 = 70, age 7 = 79, age 8 = 57 and age 9 = 29.
As an indication of socioeconomic status (SES), the Index of
Multiple Deprivation (IMD) was calculated based on postcode
data. IMD returns rank-ordered data, with one being the
J Child Psychol Psychiatr 2015; 56(8): 848–56
highest level of deprivation and 32,482 the lowest level. The
median rank for the full sample was 25,954 (range 3,346–
32,444). This is higher (i.e. less deprived) than the national
average of 16,241, but similar to Oxfordshire’s average of
21,809 (Department for Communities & Local Government,
2011).
Measures
Infant vocabulary measure (t1). The Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (OCDI; Hamilton, Plunkett, &
Schafer, 2000) – an Anglicised adaptation of the American CDI
(Fenson et al., 1994) – was completed in infancy. Parents were
required to indicate which of the 416 words on the checklist
their child was able to understand (CDI comprehension) and
understand and say (CDI production).
School-age measures (t2). Vocabulary knowledge. The
Receptive and Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Tests
(Brownell, 2000) were administered. To tap receptive vocabulary, children heard a series of graded words, and were
required to select the corresponding picture from four alternatives for each word (test/retest reliability = .78 to .93). For
expressive vocabulary, children were asked to name a series of
graded pictures (test/retest reliability = .88 to .91).
Phonological awareness. The Elision subtest of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, &
Rashotte, 1999) was administered. For each orally presented
word, children were asked to delete a sublexical unit and
supply the word that remained (e.g. popcorn without corn
leaves pop; bold without b leaves old; test/retest reliability = .79 to .88).
Reading accuracy. Children of all ages completed the Diagnostic Test of Word Reading Processes (Forum for Research into
Language and Literacy, 2012), which involved reading aloud
lists of graded nonwords, regular words and exception words
(reliability, a = .99).
Reading comprehension. Passage reading comprehension
was assessed via the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (Snowling et al., 2009). Children in Year 1 and above (age
5 upwards) were required to read aloud two short stories and
after each story to answer a series of eight related questions.
The two stories that individual children read were dictated by
their level of reading accuracy (reliability, a = .48 to .77).
Nonverbal ability. The Matrices subtest of the British Abilities
Scale II (Elliot, Smith, & McCulloch, 1997) was given to
measure nonverbal reasoning. Children were presented with
an incomplete matrix of abstract figures and were instructed to
choose the correct shape from an array of six to complete the
matrix (test/retest reliability = .64).
Procedure
Each child was tested individually in person at school, in their
home, or in the Department of Experimental Psychology,
University of Oxford. Sessions lasted for approximately 1 hr
and all tests were administered by members of the research
team.
Results
Sample characteristics in infancy and school-age
The age at which children had their vocabulary
knowledge measured in infancy via the OCDI varied
from 16 to 24 months. The average number of words
comprehended and produced is broken down by age
group in Table 1. These cross-sectional data indicate
© 2015 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, on behalf of Association for
Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
doi:10.1111/jcpp.12378
Infant vocabulary and school-age outcomes
that the number of words known and used increased
month-by-month, and show that there was wide
variability in performance at each month.
Multiple OCDIs were available for 100 of the
children.1 Correlation analyses indicated that across
an average lag of 4 months (range = 1–8), the test/
retest reliability coefficients were .75 for comprehension and .70 for production (ps < .001). Summary statistics for performance on the cognitive measures taken at t2 are given in Table 2. At a group level, the children are performing in the highaverage range on all measures. Modelling longitudinal relationships Owing to the variability in the ages at which children were seen both in infancy and later childhood, age was regressed out of all raw scores at each time point. In this way, the analyses probe what the strengths of the relationships between infant vocabulary and school-age outcomes are independent of the effects of age. Structural equation modelling, using maximum likelihood estimation and implemented in MPlus version 7.11 (Muth en & Muth en, 1998–2012), was applied to explore these relationships. In the first model (Figure 1), school-age outcomes were predicted from just one independent variable: infant vocabulary. The model provides an excellent fit to the data. The first step in the analyses was to form latent variables where possible. It can be seen in Figure 1 that the factor loadings for the latent variables of infant vocabulary, and later vocabulary, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension are all high. Ow... Purchase answer to see full attachment