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CHDEV 131 Assignment 2 Notes

Annotated Notes Article #1: Teaching by Listening: The Importance of Adult-Child Conversations to Language Development (Pgs.1-4)

● Research of a representative sample of 71 families that was continued for a longitudinal assessment over 18 months.

● The amount of language input a child receives before age 3 is significantly and strongly associated with subsequent language acquisition and cognitive development. Although this advice is undoubtedly sound, it may not place enough emphasis on the child’s role in language-based exchanges.

● Many parents have drawn exactly such conclusions that children listen more with the T.V not present.

● If the primary value of adult speech is to potentiate child speech as part of a trial-and-error, experiential process of language acquisition, then adult speech is valuable inasmuch as it fosters child speech, and either adult speech or electronic stimulus that crowds out child speech may be counterproductive.

● This analysis uses a large, unique new data set of parent and child language use collected naturalistically in the home environment to test the independent contributions of adult language input, child language use, and television viewing on subsequent child language development among children who were between the ages of 2 and 36 months at enrollment.

● Data were collected for 12-hour periods 1 day a month for 6 months (or over 18 months in the longitudinal sample) by using a new product called LENA (Language Environment Analysis [LENA Foundation, Boulder, CO]).

● The hardware component is a small digital recorder called a digital language processor, which fits into a pocket on a special vest worn by the child.

● Five participants were excluded because their recordings were all 12 hours in duration; 5 were excluded because their Preschool Language Scale (PLS) data were judged by raters to have poor validity; and 28 were excluded because their PLS assessments were not completed during phase 1.

● Parents of children aged 2 to 48 months were invited to participate through advertising in local newspapers and direct-mail solicitation.

● During the course of the original 6-month study period, 13 participants dropped out or moved away, and final assessments could not be scheduled with an additional 8 families.

● Participants’ language capacity was formally assessed by a speech language pathologist by using the Preschool Language Scale, Fourth Edition (PLS-4).15 These assessments occurred throughout the 6-month study period, with each child assessed an average of 2.3 times.

● Cohen’s of interrater agreement between the machine and human coding of segments into adult speech is 0.65; for television exposure it is 0.57. Among segments that human transcribers identified as adult speech, 82% were correctly identified as such by the

software, with 2% erroneously coded as child speech, and 4% erroneously coded as television.

● The technical details of this process have been described elsewhere.17–19 To assess the fidelity of the software, a subsample of seventy 12-hour sessions (an age-stratified random sample) were coded by human coders, and the resulting estimates were compared with those of the software.

● The software cannot identify whether the child was attending to the television while hearing it, and as such cannot distinguish between viewing and background exposure to television, both of which degrade young children’s ability to attend to tasks or people.

● For the identification of television exposure, this method compares favorably to parent-report and other means of assessing child television viewing, which is notoriously difficult to measure.

● A conversation is defined as a segment of speech of any length or number of speakers, separated by not 5 seconds of silence

● Controlling for sociodemographic variables, including the child’s age, gender, and race, the mother’s and father’s education level, and household income.

Article #2: Infant Media Exposure and Toddler Development (Pgs. 1-3)

● Media exposure plays an important role in the development of young children’s lives. ● The increasing exposure of infants and toddlers to various types of media has resulted from

the emergence of media content. ● Children from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) are likely to be most

vulnerable to any adverse effects of media exposure. ● They have been documented to have the greatest exposure to media and are at increased

risk in general for disparities in early development, school readiness, and educational achievement.

● Emerging research strongly suggests the potential for adverse effects of media beginning in infancy.

● many of the studies have been performed with families that are not economically disadvantaged (SES).

● There has been no prior longitudinal study performed in the United States concerning the effect of media exposure on the development of infants from families with low SES.

● There has been effects of noneducational media in preschool and school aged children on later outcomes, including cognition, achievement, and behavior.

● 2 hypotheses: first, that total duration of media exposure in infancy would be adversely related to developmental outcomes, and second, that associations between media exposure and developmental outcomes would vary depending on content, with the greatest adverse effects seen for noneducational content.

● Performed a longitudinal analysis of mother-infant dyads participating in the Bellevue Project for Early Language, Literacy, and Education Success.

● A study assessing the role of primary care interventions in promoting child development through enhanced shared reading and play.

● The independent variables were total duration and content of media exposure at age 6 months.

● The dependent variables were cognitive and language development at age 14 months.

● Assessed potential confounders, including home environmental factors, and family sociodemographic characteristics.

● Assessed electronic media exposure in the home with a widely used method. ● Mothers were asked to provide information about all electronic media (television,

videos/DVDs, movies, and games) to which the infant had been exposed on the most recent typical day, including name and duration(in minutes)of each program.

● Older child/adult–oriented programs consisted of those considered appropriate for school-aged children (7 years and older) and teenagers but not for younger children on the basis of violence and other such content.

● Adult-oriented programs consisted of those not oriented toward children but adults, of genres including news, sports, games, talks, variety, soap opera, drama, and comedy.

● Noneducational young child-oriented programs consisted of those without educational content intended for children 2 to 6 years old

● Collected sociodemographic data from maternal interviews conducted during the postpartum period, including mother’s educational level, age, primary language spoken, ethnicity, country of origin, and marital status, and child’s sex and position in the birth order.