2018 Sunday Symposium
Sunday, November 4, 2018 | Sunday Symposium, Metcalf Large | 11am
Addressing the Putative “Word Gap”: Approaches to Early Language Interventions
Helping Children Learn Language: Why Bother?
Roberta M. Golinkoff (University of Delaware) and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (Temple University & Brookings Institute)
New research indicates that language as measured in kindergarten is the single best predictor of school achievement in all subjects in 3rd and 5th grades. It is also implicated in the development of conceptual knowledge, self-regulation, executive function, health outcomes, and reading comprehension. Not surprisingly then, children with weak language skills — such as those from low-income backgrounds relative to their peers from middle- and high- income backgrounds — are disadvantaged in school. Yet recent challenges to the 30-million-word-gap have thrown these conclusions into question. Here we take on that challenge by presenting evidence (behavioral and from recent neurological studies) on the word gap. In addition, we describe 6 principles, distilled from the literature on language learning, that can be used to enhance language outcomes in all children. In addition, we briefly describe interventions that foster language growth and a new measure of language development that validates the word gap.
Pointing to Success: A home-based intervention for parents of infants
Meredith Rowe (Harvard University Graduate School of Education)
Children communicate via gesture before they can speak, and SES disparities in children’s vocabulary can be traced back to differences in parents’ and children’s early gestural communication. Further, parents’ mindsets about intelligence contribute to their communication with children. We implemented a gesture training with a growth mindset component with 47 parents of 10-month-olds with the goal of increasing parents’ use of the pointing gesture, infant’s use of pointing, and child vocabulary. The training had an effect on parent gesture, such that parents who received the intervention increased more in their pointing from child age 10- to 12-months than parents in the control condition. The training also had a significant effect on child gesture use with parents. Further, the effects of the intervention were stronger for parents who endorsed fixed mindsets at baseline, and had an added benefit of increased vocabulary growth from for children of parents who endorsed fixed mindsets.
The Duet Project: A community-based home-visiting partnership
Rebecca Alper (Temple University)
Challenges to caregiver-implemented interventions include accessing high-risk families, individualization, and fidelity. This study approached these challenges by establishing a research–community partnership. Intervention materials included dynamic, multi-media, and culturally sensitive training modules designed to improve early caregiver–child language interaction quality. The modules were delivered to families through existing home-visiting programs. We collected measures of child language, caregiver–child interaction quantity and quality, knowledge of child development, and psychosocial factors from 41 low-income caregivers and their 12- to 27-month-old children at baseline (n=23 control, n=18 intervention). Twenty-four families completed the follow-up (n=15 control, n=9 intervention). The intervention group’s global standard scores on the Preschool Language Scales-Fifth Edition (PLS-5) increased by an average of 5.9 points (SD=12.4) from baseline—compared to -2.333 (SD=11.851) for the control group. We saw similar changes on the Ages and Stages Questionnaire-Third Edition (ASQ-3). These results suggest that community–research partnerships may help support intervention effectiveness.
The FACT Project: A small-group parent-training through schools
Rachel Romeo (Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Despite multitudes of early childhood intervention programs, many low-income children still arrive at school with language skills below those of their wealthier peers. The Family Attention and Cognition Training (FACT) project is a randomized controlled trial including 101 families with newly-enrolled preschool and/or Kindergarten children. Trained facilitators led small groups of parents (in English or Spanish) in an interactive, culturally-sensitive 9-week curriculum on using “meaningFULL language” to enhance children’s communication, executive functioning, and school readiness. Children completed baseline and follow-up assessments of verbal and nonverbal skills; half of each group completed additional standardized assessments, home language recording, and neuroimaging. Families who completed the intervention (67%) exhibited significantly increased adult-child conversational turns compared to controls. The magnitude of change correlated positively with score increases on standardized language assessments, which in turn related to cortical thickening in canonical language-related brain regions. Results suggest that parent-implemented language interventions may improve children’s language skills via accelerated neural maturation.