1,721,280 research outputs found
Do early noun and verb production predict later verb and noun production? Theoretical implications
No full textMany studies have addressed the question of the relative dominance of nouns over verbs in the productive vocabularies of children in the second year of life. Surprisingly, cross-class (noun-to-verb and verb-to-noun) relations between these two lexical categories have seldom been investigated. The present longitudinal study employed observational and parent-report data obtained from 30 mother-child dyads at 1;4, 1;8, and 2;0 to examine this issue. Both the Natural Partitions/Relational Relativity (NP/RR) hypothesis and the Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM) predict that having an initial repertoire of common nouns should facilitate the acquisition of novel verbs, whereas only the ECM suggests that children exploit the syntactic and semantic constraints of known verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns. In line with the ECM, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the percentages of nouns produced by children at 1;4 predicted later verbs at 1;8, whereas the percentages of verbs produced at 1;8 predicted later nouns at 2;
Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian. Contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language
No full textBecause of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this issue in a sample of twenty-six mother-child dyads whose spontaneous conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded at 1;4 and 1;8. The percentages of nouns occurring in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4 predicted children's production of noun types at 1;8. For verbs, children's growth rates were positively predicted by the percentages of input verbs occurring in utterance-initial position, but negatively predicted by the percentages of verbs located in the final position of maternal utterances at 1;4. These findings clearly illustrate that the effects of positional salience vary across lexical categories
‘Mixed Blessings’
No full textBackground: Most studies of the effects of parental religiousness on parenting and child development focus on a particular religion or cultural group, which limits generalizations that can be made about the effects of parental religiousness on family life.Methods: We assessed the associations among parental religiousness, parenting, and children’s adjustment in a 3-year longitudinal investigation of 1,198 families from nine countries. We included four religions (Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, and Islam) plus unaffiliated parents, two positive (efficacy and warmth) and two negative (control and rejection) parenting practices, and two positive (social competence and school performance) and two negative (internalizing and externalizing) child outcomes. Parents and children were informants.Results: Greater parent religiousness had both positive and negative associations with parenting and child adjustment. Greater parent religiousness when children were age 8 was associated with higher parental efficacy at age 9 and, in turn, children’s better social competence and school performance and fewer child internalizing and externalizing problems at age 10. However, greater parent religiousness at age 8 was also associated with more parental control at age 9, which in turn was associated with more child internalizing and externalizing problems at age 10. Parental warmth and rejection had inconsistent relations with parental religiousness and child outcomes depending on the informant. With a few exceptions, similar patterns of results held for all four religions and the unaffiliated, nine sites, mothers and fathers, girls and boys, and controlling for demographic covariates.Conclusions: Parents and children agree that parental religiousness is associated with more controlling parenting and, in turn, increased child problem behaviors. However, children see religiousness as related to parental rejection, whereas parents see religiousness as related to parental efficacy and warmth, which have different associations with child functioning. Studying both parent and child views of religiousness and parenting is important to understand the effects of parental religiousness on parents and children.</p
Quasi-Experimental Methods
No full textA quasi-experiment is a research method in which the experimenter uses preexisting
differences between participants rather than random assignment to allocate the participants to
different conditions of the study. An example of a quasi-experiment is a comparison between
the behavior of children at high risk and at low risk of autism spectrum disorder. The first
condition corresponds to children who have an older brother or sister who has received a
clinical diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder from expert clinicians. The second condition
corresponds to children who do not have an older brother or sister with autism spectrum
disorder. For objective reasons, the researcher cannot assign the two conditions to all the
participants.
Sometimes, researchers cannot randomly assign the participants to the experimental
conditions for ethical reasons. For example, let us assume a researcher is aiming to evaluate
the effects of malnutrition on child development. To achieve this aim, one group of children
will receive the recommended amount of food per day, while the other group will not receive
enough food. The researcher then measures the children’s growth curves in the two groups.
However, in this case, the researcher must face the dilemma of deciding how to select the
group that will receive the recommended amount of food versus the malnourished group.
Naturally, no researcher has the right to take on such a responsibility. Therefore, the best way
to solve this ethical dilemma is to apply a quasi-experimental design in which naturally fooddeprived
children are compared with children living in different conditions.
In other cases, researchers cannot assign participants to an experimental condition for
practical reasons. For example, if we want to study the effects of supplementary water
consumption at school on children’s cognitive performance, it is difficult to assign pupils within
the same class to different conditions. In such a case, it is more practical to consider the
whole class a unit, to administer supplementary water to a group of classes, and then to
compare the cognitive performance of those classes with those that did not receive
supplementary water during the school day.
As a consequence of the fact that it is impossible to assign participants randomly to the
conditions of a study, any differences in the dependent variables between the groups may be
due not just to manipulation of the independent variables but also to several other factors that
differ between the groups. For example, if we identify differences between males and females
in relation to disgust sensitivity, these differences may be due to neurobiological factors, for
example, the activation of different brain circuits in response to disgust elicitors, differences in
educational history, or cultural factors. Thus, further research is needed to explore alternative
explanations. Usually, these alternative explanations are not determined by logic; rather,
researchers consider the most relevant ones according to the field of study.
A focus of the study of development is how behavior changes over time. Chronological age is
the variable most used to operationalize changes in relation to time. Because experimenters
cannot assign chronological age randomly to their participants, quasi-experimental methods
offer a unique opportunity to investigate changes in the course of human development.
Researchers mainly use quasi-experimental design to explore the following: (a) differences
between preselected groups at the same chronological age, (b) comparisons between groups
characterized by different chronological ages, and (c) differences in the same group of
participants at different chronological ages. This entry provides a description of three main
quasi-experimental designs that explore these differences, namely, nonequivalent control
group design, cross-sectional design, and longitudinal design. Also considered are the
implications of each design for the interpretation of the results as well as threats to internalvalidity and ways to address them. The entry concludes with a summary of best practices to
enhance the utility of quasi-experimental designs for studying behavior in the life span of
human development
JBD783272_supplemental_table_1 - Household income predicts trajectories of child internalizing and externalizing behavior in high-, middle-, and low-income countries
No full textJBD783272_supplemental_table_1 for Household income predicts trajectories of child internalizing and externalizing behavior in high-, middle-, and low-income countries by Jennifer E. Lansford, Patrick S. Malone, Sombat Tapanya, Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado, Arnaldo Zelli, Liane Peña Alampay, Suha M. Al-Hassan, Dario Bacchini, Marc H. Bornstein, Lei Chang, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Laura Di Giunta, Kenneth A. Dodge, Paul Oburu, Concetta Pastorelli, Ann T. Skinner, Emma Sorbring, and Laurence Steinberg in International Journal of Behavioral Development</p
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