Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Summary
Quantitative aspects of the study of animal and human behaviour are increasingly relevant to test hypotheses and find empirical support for them. At the same time, photo and video cameras can store a large number of video recordings and are often used to monitor the subjects remotely. Researchers frequently face the need to code considerable quantities of video recordings with relatively flexible software, often constrained by species-specific options or exact settings.
BORIS is a free, open-source and multiplatform standalone program that allows a user-specific coding environment to be set for a computer-based review of previously recorded videos or live observations. Being open to user-specific settings, the program allows a project-based ethogram to be defined that can then be shared with collaborators, or can be imported or modified.
Projects created in BORIS can include a list of observations, and each observation may include one or two videos (e.g. simultaneous screening of visual stimuli and the subject being tested; recordings from different sides of an aquarium). Once the user has set an ethogram, including state or point events or both, coding can be performed using previously assigned keys on the computer keyboard. BORIS allows definition of an unlimited number of events (states/point events) and subjects.
Once the coding process is completed, the program can extract a time-budget or single or grouped observations automatically and present an at-a-glance summary of the main behavioural features. The observation data and time-budget analysis can be exported in many common formats (TSV, CSV, ODF, XLS, SQL and JSON). The observed events can be plotted and exported in various graphic formats (SVG, PNG, JPG, TIFF, EPS and PDF).

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BORIS: a free, versatile open-source event-logging software for video/audio coding and live observations

Investigators, who are increasingly implored to present and discuss effect size statistics, might comply more often if they understood more clearly what is required. When investigators wish to report effect sizes derived from analyses of variance that include repeated measures, past advice has been problematic. Only recently has a generally useful effect size statistic been proposed for such designs: generalized eta squared (η
 G
 2
 ; Olejnik & Algina, 2003). Here, we present this method, explain that η
 G
 2
 is preferred to eta squared and partial eta squared because it provides comparability across between-subjects and within-subjects designs, show that it can easily be computed from information provided by standard statistical packages, and recommend that investigators provide it routinely in their research reports when appropriate.

/pdf/recommended-effect-size-statistics-for-repeated-measures-zbv3ptel7t.pdf

Recommended effect size statistics for repeated measures designs.

This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N = 7,669) that focused on leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all measures in the outcome domains of reading comprehension and technical reading and spelling, moderate to strong correlations with print exposure were found. The outcomes support an upward spiral of causality: Children who are more proficient in comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills read more; because of more print exposure, their comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills improved more with each year of education. For example, in preschool and kindergarten print exposure explained 12% of the variance in oral language skills, in primary school 13%, in middle school 19%, in high school 30%, and in college and university 34%. Moderate associations of print exposure with academic achievement indicate that frequent readers are more successful students. Interestingly, poor readers also appear to benefit from independent leisure time reading. We conclude that shared book reading to preconventional readers may be part of a continuum of out-of-school reading experiences that facilitate children's language, reading, and spelling achievement throughout their development.

To read or not to read: A meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood.

Style in Language

Fifty-six children were observed longitudinally from 18 to 30 months of age interacting with their mothers during a Communication Play that contained 8 scenes designed to encourage interacting, requesting, commenting, and narrating. Of primary concern was how often symbols infused the child's states of engagement with people and objects and how experience in such symbol-infused states related to language acquisition. Findings indicate that symbols increasingly infuse joint engagement, and that both the timing and the trajectory vary widely among typically developing toddlers, especially during the last half of the 2nd year. Moreover, variations in amount of symbol-infused supported joint engagement may both be influenced by variations in the onset of language and contribute to differences in language facility at 30 months.

The Development of Symbol-Infused Joint Engagement.

Systematic longitudinal observations were made as typically developing toddlers and young children with autism and with Down syndrome interacted with their caregivers in order to document how joint engagement developed over a year-long period and how variations in joint engagement experiences predicted language outcome. Children with autism displayed a persistent deficit in coordinated joint attention; children with Down syndrome were significantly less able to infuse symbols into joint engagement. For all groups, variations in amount of symbol-infused supported joint engagement, a state in which the child attended to a shared object and to language but not actively to the partner, contributed to differences in expressive and receptive language outcome, over and above initial language capacity.

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Joint Engagement and the Emergence of Language in Children with Autism and Down Syndrome

Child and Maternal Contributions to Shared Reading: Effects on Language and Literacy Development.

A battery of 17 rating items were applied to video records of typically-developing toddlers and young children with autism and Down syndrome interacting with their parents during the Communication Play Protocol. This battery provided a reliable and broad view of the joint engagement triad of child, partner, and shared topic. Ratings of the child’s joint engagement correlated very strongly with state coding of joint engagement and replicated the finding that coordinated joint engagement was less likely in children with autism. Ratings of other child actions, of parent contributions, and of shared topics and communicative dynamics also documented pervasive variations related to diagnosis, language facility, and communicative context.

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Rating Parent-Child Interactions: Joint Engagement, Communication Dynamics, and Shared Topics in Autism, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development

This research traces the development of symbol-infused joint engagement during mother–child interactions into the preschool years Forty-nine children, who had been previously observed as toddlers (L B Adamson, R Bakeman, & D F Deckner, [Adamson, L B, 2004]), were systematically observed during interactions with their mothers at ages 3½, 4½, and 5½ during activities related to the past and future, internal states, and graphic systems Although the amount of symbol-infused joint engagement reached a ceiling by 3½, its focus continued to become more complex and its form more balanced Individual differences in children's symbol-infused joint engagement were stable across 4 years These findings highlight both how joint engagement is transformed as conversational skills develop and how it remains rooted in earlier interactions and supported by caregiver's actions

Deborah F. Deckner

Papers

The Development of Symbol-Infused Joint Engagement.

Joint Engagement and the Emergence of Language in Children with Autism and Down Syndrome

Child and Maternal Contributions to Shared Reading: Effects on Language and Literacy Development.

Rating Parent-Child Interactions: Joint Engagement, Communication Dynamics, and Shared Topics in Autism, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development

From Interactions to Conversations: The Development of Joint Engagement during Early Childhood.