The influence of temperament and perinatal factors on language development: a longitudinal study.

Early language development is characterized by large individual variation. Several factors were proposed to contribute to individual pathways of language acquisition in infancy and childhood. One of the biologically based explaining factors is temperament, however, the exact contributions and the timing of the effects merits further research. Pre-term status, infant sex, and environmental factors such as maternal education and maternal language are also involved. Our study aimed to investigate the longitudinal relationship between infant temperament and early language development, also considering infant gender, gestational age, and birthweight. Early temperament was assessed at 6, 9, 18, 24, and 30 months with the Very Short Form of Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ-R) and the Very Short Form of Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ). Early nonverbal communication skills, receptive and expressive vocabulary were evaluated with the Hungarian version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (HCDI). Our study adds further evidence to the contribution of infant temperament to early language development. Temperament, infant gender, and gestational age were associated with language development in infancy. Infants and toddlers with higher Surgency might enter communicative situations more readily and show more engagement with adult social partners, which is favorable for communication development. Gestational age was previously identified as a predictor for language in preterm infants. Our results extend this association to the later and narrower gestational age time window of term deliveries. Infants born after longer gestation develop better expressive vocabulary in toddlerhood. Gestational age may mark prenatal developmental processes that may exert influence on the development of verbal communication at later ages.

Development and norming of the Hungarian CDI-III: A screening tool for language delay.

BACKGROUND: Difficulties in language development are related to social and emotional problems, lower academic outcomes, and lower quality of life from childhood to adolescence. These grave consequences might be significantly reduced by timely identification and professional support. The introduction of systematic screening for language delay (LD) in 3-year-old children in Hungary was based on the recent adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI-III (HCDI-III). AIMS: To explore the relevant psychometric properties of the HCDI-III; to identify factors characteristic of the families and children influencing language development at the age group under investigation; and to evaluate the adequacy of the tool for the purpose of screening LD in kindergarten at the age of 3 years. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The norming study of the HCDI-III was conducted in a collaborative research project with the Metropolitan Pedagogical Services in Budapest. HCDI-III parent report forms along with a demographic survey form were distributed to parents of all Hungarian-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;2 without special education needs. The normative sample comprised data from 1424 children aged 2;0-4;2 with 51.1% boys and 48.9% girls. The data set contained information including language skills, basic demographics, birth conditions, health issues and socio-economic status (SES). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: In the HCDI-III form, six outcome variables were created to cover the domains of expressive vocabulary, morphosyntax and language use. Statistical analyses revealed appropriate psychometric properties of five outcome variables that showed a normal distribution and were strongly correlated to age. Outcomes of girls were slightly (but significantly) higher on scales corresponding to vocabulary, syntax, language use and productivity. Most variables were highly correlated with one another even with age partialled out. Multiple regression analyses revealed significant effect of age, gender and parental education on all main outcome variables. Neither one of the other eight predictors, including familial and birth-related factors, affected linguistic outcomes in our sample. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The results are consistent with the majority of Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) studies, and support the psychometric eligibility of the instrument for screening purposes between 30 and 50 months. As certain regions of Hungary are characterised by a high prevalence of low-SES families, more research is needed to adapt the screening procedure and subsequent measures to their needs. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Difficulties in language development are related to lower social and academic outcomes and lower quality of life from childhood to adolescence. These grave consequences might be significantly reduced by timely identification and professional support. Structured parent report forms such as the MacArthur-Bates CDI are widely accepted methods for screening children with LD. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study reports the Hungarian adaptation and norming of the CDI-III form. Statistical analyses revealed appropriate psychometric properties of most of its sections. Language outcomes were affected by age, gender and parental education on all main outcome variables in children between 2 and 4 years of age. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The results support the psychometric eligibility of the HCDI-III instrument for screening purposes. The introduction of the screening procedure in clinical practice is expected to improve early support of children with language difficulties and reduce risks of developmental problems related to language disorders.

Case Marking in Hungarian Children with Specific Language Impairment.

This study examines whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) acquiring a language with a rich case marking system (Hungarian) have difficulty with case, and, if so, whether the difficulty is comparable for spatial and nonspatial meanings. Data were drawn from narrative samples and from a sentence repetition task. Suffixes were tested both in their spatial and nonspatial meanings. Participants with SLI were compared to same-age peers and younger typically developing children matched on receptive vocabulary scores ( VC children ). Results show that although case-marking errors are very rare in spontaneous speech in Hungarian children with SLI, the number of case marked nouns and of different case markers is significantly lower in children with SLI. In the elicited production task, overall performance of the children with SLI was significantly below that of VC children, but children with SLI and VC children scored higher with spatial than with nonspatial meanings. The results are in line with expectations based on processing accounts which posit greater difficulties with less transparent details of grammar.

Processing relative clauses by Hungarian typically developing children.

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focussed on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically developing children in two age groups (ages of 4;11-7;2 and 8;2-11;4) in an act-out task. Differences in comprehension difficulty between different word order patterns and different head function relations were observed independently of each other. The structural properties causing difficulties in comprehension were interruption of main clauses, greater distance between the verb and its arguments, accusative case of relative pronouns, and SO head function relations. Importantly, analyses of associations between working memory and sentence comprehension revealed that structural factors made processing difficult by burdening components of working memory. These results support processing accounts of sentence comprehension in a language typologically different from English.

Tense and Aspect in Childhood Language Impairment: Contributions from Hungarian.

Previous studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 typically developing children matched for age, and 21 typically developing children matched for receptive vocabulary scores were tested on their comprehension and production of both imperfective and perfective verb forms in past tense contexts. Although the groups did not differ in their comprehension performance, the children with LI were less accurate than both comparison groups in producing both imperfective and perfective forms. Based on these results, it appears that children with LI have difficulties selecting the appropriate aspectual marking in past tense contexts.

Use of noun morphology by children with language impairment: the case of Hungarian.

BACKGROUND: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. AIMS: Hungarian is an agglutinating language with multiple suffixation, in which both regular-class and irregular-class nouns contain the same recognizable grammatical markers, but the two classes differ in their morphophonology and productivity. Such typological characteristics provide a good basis for evaluating processing accounts of language impairment such as the morphological richness account. METHODS & PROCEDURES: We examined the production of Hungarian irregular and regular noun morphology through elicited production of nouns with plural, accusative case and plural plus accusative case suffixes in an older (8-10 years) and a younger (4-7 years) group of children with language impairment and two verbal control groups matched on vocabulary size. The children's accuracy was scored both in terms of grammatical function (whether plural and/or accusative case was appropriately marked) and morphophonology (whether the production reflected the phonotactic form required for the stem plus suffix). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The younger children with language impairment were less accurate than the younger verbal control children when two suffixes (marking plural and accusative case) were required, at least when noun stem classes were regular. All groups showed significant overgeneralization of stem forms with correct selection of suffixes. However, there were strong word frequency effects in the language impairment, but not in the verbal control groups. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Much of the data were consistent with predictions of the morphological richness account. However, there was also evidence suggestive of differences between the language impairment and verbal control groups in their representations. In particular, the children with language impairment seemed to rely more (though not exclusively) on memorized items in the lexicon.

The use of tense and agreement by Hungarian-speaking children with language impairment.

PURPOSE: Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment (LI). METHOD: Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object. RESULTS: The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. For both groups of children, the frequency of occurrence of the inflection in the language was a significant predictor of accuracy level. The two groups of children were also similar in their pattern of errors. Inflections produced in place of the correct inflection usually differed from the correct form on a single dimension (e.g., tense or definiteness), though no single dimension was consistently problematic. CONCLUSIONS: Accounts that assume problems specific to agreement do not provide an explanation for the observed pattern of findings. The findings are generally compatible with accounts that assume processing limitations in children with LI, such as the morphological richness account. One nonmorphosyntactic factor (the retention of sequences of sounds) appeared to be functionally related to inflection accuracy and may prove to be important in a language with numerous inflections such as Hungarian.