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Pediatricians recommend that parents read aloud to children, on the assumption that book reading during early childhood promotes language skills. However, it is not clear that children similarly profit from the practice, particularly those whose behavioral tendencies interfere with processes that leverage supportive environmental experiences into language gains. Participants in this two-wave longitudinal cohort study were 546 (282 boys, 264 girls) 4–5 year-olds enrolled in 24 population-based childcare centers in 13 municipalities across Denmark. Teachers administered standardized assessments of child language skills twice, approximately 6 months apart. At the outset, parents reported the frequency an adult read books to the child at home, and teachers assayed child conduct problems and hyperactivity. Results indicated that home book reading benefits were not uniformly distributed. Book reading predicted improvements in communication skills (β = 0.74) and language comprehension (β = 0.31), with the strongest effects for children with above average conduct problems (β = 0.88 to 1.72) and those with below average hyperactivity (β = 1.35).

This chapter has two purposes. Firstly, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of childcare educator-administered language assessment. We address design questions pertaining to selection of target domains, selecting items and writing instructions, brevity vs. precision, use with bilinguals, accommodating wishes of users (e.g., local municipalities or commissioning government bodies), and the potentials for universal national assessment. We draw on lessons learned from developing two such instruments for a national Danish-language and preliteracy assessment program. Secondly, we introduce those two educator-administered instruments—Language Assessment 3-6 (LA 3-6) and Language Assessment 2-year-olds (LA 2)—with respect to content, norming, gender and socioeconomic aspects as well as use with bilinguals, and finally psychometric qualities. The potential of educator-administered assessment has been underappreciated. We hope that this chapter can provide a foundation for the extension of this approach in other contexts, while at the same time acknowledging that linguistic and cultural adaptations are crucial. This monograph has two main purposes. Firstly, we discuss purposes, advantages, and disadvantages as well as the challenges of different formats of language assessment, concluding with a focus on educator-administered language assessment in early childhood and education programs. We address the selection of assessment domains, the trade-off between brevity and precision, the challenge of assessing bilinguals, and accommodating the requirements of funders (e.g., government agencies) and users (e.g., educators and schools). We draw on lessons learned from developing two instruments for a national Danish-language and preliteracy assessment program. Secondly, we introduce those two educator-administered instruments—Language Assessment 3-6 (LA 3-6) and Language Assessment 2-year-olds (LA 2)—with respect to content, norming, gender and socioeconomic influences as well as psychometric qualities. Our intention is that this experience can help enable the extension of the educator-based approach to other languages and contexts, while simultaneously acknowledging that linguistic and cultural adaptations are crucial.

This paper relies on a large-scale sample of genotyped individuals linked with detailed register data in Denmark to investigate the context-dependence of genetic influences on human capital formation. We show that the returns to genetic endowments, measured by a polygenic score for educational attainment, are significantly attenuated by childhood disadvantage. We replicate the findings in a within-family analysis, where we exploit exogenous genetic variation across siblings to control for unobserved family influences. We also explore gender differences in the context-dependence of genetic influences and find the attenuation effect of childhood disadvantage on educational attainment to be significantly stronger for males than for females. We show our findings extend to a representative sample of the Danish population. Our results highlight an important mechanism driving the persistence of disadvantage across generations. We show that children who experience childhood disadvantage are not able to fully realize their educational potential, even in the context of the generous Danish welfare-state.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a non-persistent chemical with endocrine disrupting abilities widely used in a variety of consumer products. The fetal brain is particularly sensitive to chemical exposures due to its rapid growth and complexity. Some studies have reported associationbetween maternal BPA exposure and behavior but few have assessed impact on cognitive development, and to our knowledge no studies have specifically assessed the impact on language development. We therefore assessed whether maternal urinary BPA concentration during pregnancy was associated with language development and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in offspring aged 18–36 months in the prospective Odense Child Cohort. BPA was analyzed in 3rd trimester maternal fasting urine spot samples. Language development was addressed among 535 children using the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories at median age 21 months; ADHD traits were assessed by parents of 658 children using the Child Behavior Checklist for ages 1½-5 years at mean age 2.7 years. Associations were assessed using logistic regression models comparing children below the 15th percentile score for language and above the 85 percentiles score for ADHD with the other children while stratifying by sex and adjusting for maternal education, duration of breastfeeding and maternal urine phthalates. BPA was detected in 85.3% of the urine samples (median 1.2 ng/ml). Boys of mothers with BPA exposure in the highest tertile had an odds ratio of 3.70 (95% CI 1.34–10.21) of being in the lowest 15th percentile of vocabulary score compared to boys of mothers within the lowest tertile of BPA exposure after adjustment, whereas no association was found in girls. No clear dose-response relationship between maternal BPA and ADHD scores above the 85th percentile was found for either sex. Since early language development is a predictor of future reading skills and educational success, more epidemiological studies assessing BPA exposure and language skills are needed to confirm our findings.

Preschool children’s language and preliteracy skills are influenced by their home literacy environments. We asked to what extent this is true even for children in a context, Denmark, with near-universal childcare (97% at age 3-5), and additionally, if it holds specifically for dual-language learners. The sample consisted of 5,791 4-6-year-olds from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who had attended full-time childcare since age 1–1½ on average. Despite years in childcare programs, two home literacy factors, book exposure and preliteracy activities, were significantly related to children’s Danish language and preliteracy skills. Moreover, this relation was significantly stronger for children learning a minority language at home. High book exposure either narrowed or closed the Danish majority language skill gap with single-language learners. Early entry in childcare predicted stronger language and preliteracy skills; however, early entry increased rather than diminished effects of home literacy environments on language skills, suggesting possible cross fertilization of home and childcare environments. Children with a native and a nonnative parent had substantially higher Danish language and preliteracy skills when the mother was the native than when the father was, a difference equivalent to ¾ year’s language development. Nonnative parents’ Danish proficiency and degree of Danish use showed complex relations to child outcomes, including positive, negative and null effects. Overall, the results indicate that childcare works as an addition, not a substitute for a supportive home literacy environment. Preschool children’s language and preliteracy skills are influenced by their home literacy environments. We asked to what extent this is generally true also for children in a context, Denmark, with near-universal childcare (97%), and additionally, specifically for language-minority children. The sample consisted of 5,791 4-6-year-olds from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who had attended full-time childcare since age 1½. Despite years in childcare programs, two home literacy factors, book exposure and preliteracy activities, significantly predicted children’s language and preliteracy skills. Significantly stronger predictions of majority language skills from book exposure at home were found for children learning a minority language at home. High book exposure either narrowed or closed the majority language skill gap with single-language learners. Early entry in childcare predicted stronger language and preliteracy skills; however, early entry increased rather than diminished effects of home literacy environments on language skills, suggesting possible cross fertilization of home and childcare environments. Children with a native and a nonnative parent had substantially higher Danish language and preliteracy skills when the mother was the native than when the father was. Nonnative parent’s Danish skills and degree of Danish use showed complex relations to child outcomes, including positive, negative and null effects. Overall, the results indicate that childcare works as an addition, not a substitute for a supportive home literacy environment.

“Early intervention” has been a mantra in recent debates about human capital investment. Strong theoretical models motivate this focus by predicting that investment in children is most cost-effective when they are young. The “Heckman curve” summarizes this idea visually (Heckman, 2006). However, hardly any reviews scrutinize this hypothesis empirically in modern welfare states such as those in Scandinavia that already invest heavily during early childhood. Any such review is ideally based on interventions conducted as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), set in the same welfare state, and comparable across ages through cost-standardized effects. This meta-analysis assembles cost-standardized effect estimates from 10 RCTs, including a total of 18 intervention arms and 30,578 participants (aged 1.5–24 years), conducted by the same research center in the Scandinavian welfare state of Denmark. These interventions show significant effects relative to their costs, despite the large baseline investment level. Interventions targeted at younger children tend to produce larger effects, consistent with the Heckman curve. However, variation in the effect size within age groups is as large as it is across age groups. This indicates that both the quality and timing of investments matter and that “early interventions” are not necessarily superior to later interventions.

Background: Prenatal exposure to organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticides has been associated with impaired neurodevelopment. Few longitudinal studies have investigated associations with early language development in populations with mainly low dietary exposure. Objective: To investigate associations between biomarkers of maternal gestational exposure to organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticides and the child & rsquo;s language development at age 20 & ndash;36 months in the prospective Odense Child Cohort. Methods: Metabolites of organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticides were measured in maternal urine samples collected at gestational week 28. Language development was assessed among 755 singletons at age 20 & ndash;36 months using the Vocabulary and Complexity scores of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, standardized into age and sex specific percentile scores according to a Danish reference study. Multiple logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds of scoring below the 15th percentile scores in relation to maternal urinary insecticide metabolite concentrations after adjustment for confounders. Results: The generic pyrethroid metabolite 3-phenoxybenzoic acid (3-PBA) and the chlorpyrifos metabolite 3,5,6trichloro-2-pyridinol (TCPY) were detectable in more than 90% of the urine samples analyzed. Likewise, 82.2% had detectable concentrations of diethyl phosphates (DE) and 58.4% of dimethyl phosphates (DM), both of which are common metabolites of organophosphate insecticides. None of the metabolites was associated with higher odds of delayed results below the 15th percentile language scores. In contrast, reduced probability for scoring below the 15th percentile Vocabulary score was seen for the highest tertile of 3-PBA in boys and for the upper tertile of TCPY and DE in girls. Conclusion: In this prospective cohort, with predominantly dietary insecticide exposure, we found no evidence that gestational exposure to organophosphate or pyrethroid insecticides adversely affected early language development in the children. The observed indication of a positive effect of insecticides on language development may be explained by residual and unmeasured confounding from socioeconomic factors and dietary habits. Follow-up of these children should include assessment of more complex cognitive functions in later childhood, as well as associations with their own postnatal insecticide exposure.

The acquisition of language is a human universal, achieved by all normal children raised in normal environments. However, normal environments are widely variable, with consequences for language development. This chapter introduces the subsequent chapters in this edited volume language development in social contexts. This chapter provides historical background and presents findings from two contemporary research projects. The historical background includes shifts in the field of language acquisition from linguistics to a bioecological model of development as the guiding theoretical framework, shifts from universals of language acquisition to individual differences as the outcome to be explained, and multiple methodological advances that have made possible much of the research presented in this book. This chapter also provides two examples of current empirical work on how children’s language development is shaped by the social contexts in which they live, including one project on language development in the bilingual context of immigrant families in the United States and another project on home and childcare influences on the language and preliteracy skill development of children in Denmark, in the context of near universal childcare attendance.

Are all languages processed in the same way, or might typological variation cause systematic differences between languages? We explore this question through a cross-linguistic comparison of categorical perception in two closely related languages, Danish and Norwegian. We employ drift diffusion models to reveal cross-linguistic differences in the role of context: Danish – a more phonologically-opaque language – shows equally strong context effects of both near and distal context, while Norwegian shows stronger context effect of near than distal context. We argue that the difference is due to a processing strategy: due to the more transparent sound structure of their language, Norwegians pay more attention to local acoustic information - while Danes, due to the opaque phonology of Danish, seem to use later-occurring contextual information to a larger extent. Indeed, when forcing participants to delay their decision until the full information is available, Norwegians show choice patterns more similar to those of Danes. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-linguistic studies, as even closely related languages like Danish and Norwegian, appear to be processed differently contingent on individual properties of the specific language.

Sound assessment tools are needed to evaluate effects of mathematics interventions that familiarize children with early mathematics concepts before they enter the formal school system. We developed a short version of an existing early mathematics tool based on analyses of data collected in a nationally representative Danish sample. Research findings: The Danish adaptation and development process of the Tools for Early Assessment in Math (TEAM) for children aged 3−6 years was carried out in four steps: (a) choosing and translating relevant items, (b) conducting a pilot study, (c) testing items in a representative sample of Danish children aged 3−6 years (n = 5,621), and (d) analyses based on Rasch models. The process resulted in a final 19-item version—the DK-TEAM (final)—that has no differential item functioning relative to age and gender and is sensitive to the full range of abilities. The great majority of the children viewed the test as enjoyable. Practice or Policy: The DK-TEAM (final) appears to be broadly applicable for young Danish children, though the modest reliability at 3 years (which may be remediable by adding easy items) should be kept in mind. (Less)

Previous research has shown that Danish-learning children lag behind in early lexical acquisition compared with children learning a number of other languages. This delay has been ascribed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which appears to have fewer reliable segmentation cues than other closely related languages. In support of this hypothesis, recent work has shown that the phonetic properties of Danish negatively affect online language processing in young Danish children. In this study, we used eye-tracking to investigate whether the challenges associated with processing Danish also affect how Danish-learning children between 24 and 35 months of age establish and learn novel label–object mappings. The children were presented with a series of novel mappings, either ostensively (one novel object presented alone on the screen) or ambiguously (one novel object presented together with a familiar one), through carrier phrases with different phonetic structures (more vs less opaque). Our results showed two main trends. First, Danish-learning children performed poorly on the task of mapping novel labels onto novel objects. Second, when learning did occur, accuracy was affected by the phonetic opacity of the speech stimuli. We suggest that this finding results from the interplay of a perceptually challenging speech input and a slower onset of early vocabulary experience, which in turn may delay the onset of word learning skills in Danish-learning children.

As early childhood education programming expands across the globe, there is an increased need to understand how features of these programs influence children’s development. The composition of children’s age within a classroom is one such feature, although it is much less studied than other features. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that children’s development may be influenced by the age range of their classmates. This study examines the relations between classroom age variability on children’s vocabulary development for 2,743 children between the ages of two years, nine months, and six years, 11 months enrolled in early childhood education settings in Denmark. Findings indicate a significant nonlinear relationship between the range of child age within a classroom and children’s vocabulary development, such that classrooms with a maximum age range of 24 months were associated with the greatest gains in vocabulary growth. Results give direction to policy efforts focused on expansion of early childhood education programming.

In the current study, the strength-based questionnaire Social-Emotional Assessment/Evaluation Measure (SEAM)–Research Edition was for the first time applied in a nationally representative sample of 0- to 6-year-old children. The focus of this study was the measurement properties of a Danish adaptation of SEAM. Rasch analysis was used to examine the criterion-related construct validity as well as accuracy and reliability of the measurement. The primary goal was to determine whether the 10 SEAM benchmarks could be combined into one total score or into a limited number of subscores. Data were collected by child-care providers in nonparental child-care facilities, and the response rate was high (95%; N = 9,827). The 10 benchmarks were successfully combined into two overall indexes: Empathy and Self-regulation & Cooperation. The reliability coefficients ranged from adequate (0.79) to excellent (0.94). However, standard errors of measurements were relatively large for the two indexes.

Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large number of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition process. In this study, we explored whether the presence of vocalic sounds at word boundaries impedes real-time speech processing in 24-month-old Danish-learning children, compared to word boundaries that are marked by consonantal sounds. Using eye-tracking, we tested children’s real-time comprehension of known consonant-initial and vowel-initial words when presented in either a consonant-final carrier phrase or in a vowel-final carrier phrase, thus resulting in the four boundary types C#C, C#V, V#C, and V#V. Our results showed that the presence of vocalic sounds around a word boundary—especially before—impedes processing of Danish child-directed sentences.

In both basic research and applied domains, the prevailing paradigm for assessing social development has shifted from deficit-oriented measures to strength-based assessments or a combination. However, it is not yet clear the extent to which strength-based assessment reflects one end of a single dimension of children’s socio-emotional skills, or a distinctly different dimension from a problem-focused examination. This validation study compares the Social Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM) with two well-known psychopathological questionnaires (the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form; C-TRF and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire; SDQ-T. We explore the relations between and the variation of the three questionnaires’ scores based on a low-risk sample of 2−5-year-old Danish children (n = 291). The SEAM Empathy Index is directly and positively related to the SDQ-T Prosocial subscale, while the SEAM Self-regulation & Cooperation Index is directly and negatively related to the SDQ-T Conduct problems subscale and the C-TRF Aggressive behaviour and Attention problems subscales. The variation in the SEAM indexes at the floor of the problem-based scales appears to reflect that strength-based assessments measure a distinct aspect of behaviour that is not identical to absence of problem-based behaviour. Thus, positive and negative aspects of socio-emotional skills are not entirely on the same dimension, and strength-based assessment improves the range of information. Abbreviations: Child Behavior Checklist: CBCL; Social Emotional Assessment Measure: SEAM; Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: SDQ.

Immigrant children in Denmark differ greatly in educational outcomes. This study examined whether systematic differences in majority language (L2) and preliteracy skills are apparent already at ages 2–6 in immigrant children in Denmark across regional immigration background. Danish language and preliteracy skills in 1,211 immigrant children in four regional groups (based on maternal origin) and 11,259 native Danish nonimmigrant children, all enrolled in Danish childcare centers, were assessed using an age- and gender-normed language assessment instrument. Hierarchical linear models showed that all four immigrant groups scored significantly lower than the native Danish group; the negative coefficients diminished but remained significant when socioeconomic background and having a native Danish father were controlled for. In addition, even with these controls, significant differences existed between some of the immigrant groups, suggesting that factors relating to regional immigrant background were important sources of differences in L2 development. A greater immigrant disadvantage for language than preliteracy skills was found; two immigrant groups did not differ significantly from the nonimmigrant Danish group for preliteracy skills. The results suggest that measures to reduce inequalities in long-term educational achievement between immigrant groups should be taken already before school with a particular focus on L2 language skills.

Danish children are delayed in acquiring their native language possibly because of its phonology (Bleses, Basbøll &Vach, 2011). Additionally, phonological reduction present in the Danish language results in word forms that are difficult to distinguish from each other (Basbøll, 2005). Here, we determine the potential impact of these phenomena on the phonological processing of adult Danish native speakers. Specifically, we ask whether Danish native speakers may either have under- or overspecified phonological representations compared to, for instance, Norwegian speakers. First, in a nonword repetition experiment, we found that Danish speakers perform better at repeating “Danish” than “Norwegian” nonwords, whereas Norwegian speakers were equally good at repeating nonwords in both “languages” but worse than Danish speakers at “Danish”. Second, we carried out a categorical perception experiment with a paradigm previously used for English (Connine, Blasko & Hall, 1991 and Szostak & Pitt, 2013). In their experiments, they showed that the participants rely on context when the target words begin with an ambiguous sound on the [d]-[t] or [s]-[ʃ] continuum. Moreover, this bias was more pronounced when the semantically disambiguating word was separated from the target word by a smaller number of syllables compared to when the distance between the target and disambiguating word was larger. In our study, if Danish speakers have less differentiated phonological representations, they will rely on context to a larger extent and thus this distance will have no effect on their responses. For Norwegian speakers we expect results similar to the ones of English speakers. We constructed sentences that were either biased towards the target words sendt (1) or tændt (2). We manipulated the initialphoneme to a five-step continuum with a clear [s] at one end and a clear [ts] at the other end and with three intermediate steps. The distance between the target and the disambiguating word was either one (NEAR condition) or 5-7 syllables (FAR condition). (1) Hun har sendt en (imponerende klar) mail. (2) Hun har tændt en (imponerende klar) lampe. The participants were instructed decide whether they heard sendt or tændt and to click on the corresponding word on the screen. Preliminary analysis showed that both Danish and Norwegian native speakers rely on context when presented with ambiguous phonemes. However, unlike the previous findings, there was no context by distance interaction effect either for Danish speakers or for Norwegians. Moreover, contrary to Danish speakers, context had an effect on Norwegian speakers even at the distinct end-steps. Further analysis on the full dataset and a follow-up experiment with slightly different instructions will shed light on the current preliminary findings.

The focus of this article is Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8–36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the Faroese adaptation of the MBCDI, and the second is to examine Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition. Selected percentile levels for vocabulary comprehension and production are presented, as well as gender differences and developmental trends. The study finds evidence for a spurt in productive vocabulary in the second year of life, and that vocabulary comprehension preceded production, with both showing increases with age similar to those described in the literature for other languages. Girls had an advantage in vocabulary production over boys, resulting in a significant gender difference. Finally, the early lexical composition of Faroese children is notable in that it contains a substantial number of baby-word forms.

The focus of the present study is to evaluate individual differences in response to a large (N = 1898 in the two conditions analyzed here), cluster-randomized, 20-week storybook-based language and emergent literacy intervention (SPELL) for 4–6 year old children in Denmark. Immigrant family status, pretest language and emergent literacy skills, and home literacy experience (HLE) were examined. Gains by the intervention group were evaluated using hierarchical linear modeling in comparison with gains made in the comparison condition. The intervention led to significant gains in emergent literacy measures but not language, for children of Immigrant status as well as native Danish children, with non-significant differences between the two groups. For emergent literacy measures there was a significant negative interaction between pretest level and treatment; children who began lower made greater gains than those who began higher. For language measures, although there was an overall negative relation between pretest level and gain, the interaction between pretest level and treatment was nonsignificant. The relatively low-cost and low-intensity SPELL program appears to have been successful in helping two high-priority subgroups: Immigrant children, and children with low initial skills.

BackgroundPhthalates are a group of chemicals found in a variety of consumer products. They have anti-androgenic properties and human studies have reported associations between prenatal phthalate exposure and neuropsychological development in the offspring despite different cognitive tests, different ages and varying timing of exposure.ObjectivesTo investigate the association between prenatal phthalate exposure and language development in children aged 20–36 months.MethodsIn the Odense Child Cohort, we analyzed 3rd trimester urine samples of 518 pregnant women for content of metabolites of diethyl, di-n-butyl, diisobutyl, butylbenzyl, di(2-ethylhexyl), and diisononyl phthalate, adjusted for osmolality. Language development was addressed using the Danish version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories “Words and Sentences”. Associations were assessed using logistic regression models comparing children below and above the 15th percentile while stratifying by sex and adjusting for maternal age and educational level.ResultsPhthalate metabolites were detectable in all samples although in lower levels than previous studies. Among boys, increased prenatal phthalate exposure was associated with lower scores in language development; odds ratios for vocabulary score below the 15th percentile with doubling in monoethyl phthalate, and summed di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate metabolites were respectively 1.24 (95% confidence interval: 1.05,1.46), and 1.33 (1.01,1.75). Similar associations were found for language complexity. No associations were found for girls.ConclusionsOur findings are notable, as adverse associations were suggested even in this low-level exposed population, with only one spot urine sample for exposure assessment and control for confounders. Lower scores in early language development are of relevance to health as this test predicts later educational success.

An increasing number of infants and toddlers in many countries are enrolled in early childhood education (ECE) programs, and educators thus play a central role in stimulating language development in these young children. A valid, brief educator-completed measure of language development in young children has important uses both for the identification and monitoring of language development and for the guidance and evaluation of intentional instruction and targeted interventions for children who need it. We present such a measure here for Danish, the CDI: Educator (CDI-Edu) version, which is based on well-developed and validated parent report measures, adapted for the early childhood education setting. It requires approximately 10 min per child on the part of the educator. It includes a 70-item vocabulary checklist, as well as questions concerning the child’s use of decontextualized language with respect to objects and actions distant from the here and now. The test has been standardized on a total of 5097 children aged 18–34 months. Test-retest and internal consistency measures demonstrate reliability. Validation is established through correlations with age, maternal education, the Danish One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test, and the Social Emotional Assessment Measure.

Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12–36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated with both language sample based frequencies (0.67) and frequencies of a large written corpus of Danish (0.58). Correlations within vocabulary categories between frequency and age of acquisition, restricted to words occurring in the language samples, were comparable for the two estimates. Overall, self-report based frequency estimates appear to have a promising degree of validity, which reflects their greatest strength, independence of the situation.

Identification of intervention program components most strongly associated with children’s outcomes is essential for designing programs that can be taken to scale. In this effectiveness study, a population-representative sample of 5436 3–6-year-old Danish children from 154 daycare centers participated in a cluster-randomized evaluation of three variations of a language-literacy focused curriculum (LEAP) comprising 40 twice-weekly 30-min lessons. LEAP-LARGE and LEAP-SMALL conditions involved educators’ implementation of a scope and sequence of objectives using scripted lessons provided to whole-class and small groups, respectively. In LEAP-OPEN, educators followed the scope and sequence but were allowed to determine the instructional activities for each of 40 lessons (i.e., they received no scripted lessons). A business-as-usual (BAU) condition served as the control. Overall, the largest effect sizes for children’s language and emergent literacy outcomes were found for LEAP-OPEN, although the other two LEAP conditions had positive effects for literacy outcomes. Analysis of moderation effects showed no moderation effects for children’s socioeconomic status or for non-Danish children. Finally, there was a significant association between children’s amount of exposure to the program and both language and literacy outcomes, with higher exposure associated with better outcomes: specifically, non-Danish children benefitted more than native Danish children from higher exposure for language outcomes. This study indicated that an essential component in language and emerging literacy intervention at scale is an explicit sequence and scope of learning objectives, whereas group-size and provision of scripted lessons may be less important. Identification of intervention program components most strongly associated with children’s outcomes is essential for designing programs that can be taken to scale. In this effectiveness study, a population-representative sample of 5436 3–6-year-old Danish children from 154 daycare centers participated in a cluster-randomized evaluation of three variations of a language-literacy focused curriculum (LEAP) comprising 40 twice-weekly 30-min lessons. LEAP-LARGE and LEAP-SMALL conditions involved educators’ implementation of a scope and sequence of objectives using scripted lessons provided to whole-class and small groups, respectively. In LEAP-OPEN, educators followed the scope and sequence but were allowed to determine the instructional activities for each of 40 lessons (i.e., they received no scripted lessons). A business-as-usual (BAU) condition served as the control. Overall, the largest effect sizes for children’s language and emergent literacy outcomes were found for LEAP-OPEN, although the other two LEAP conditions had positive effects for literacy outcomes. Analysis of moderation effects showed no moderation effects for children’s socioeconomic status or for non-Danish children. Finally, there was a significant association between children’s amount of exposure to the program and both language and literacy outcomes, with higher exposure associated with better outcomes: specifically, non-Danish children benefitted more than native Danish children from higher exposure for language outcomes. This study indicated that an essential component in language and emerging literacy intervention at scale is an explicit sequence and scope of learning objectives, whereas group-size and provision of scripted lessons may be less important.

The home literacy environment (HLE) has been shown to impact language and literacy skills in preschool-aged children via factors such as availability of books, frequency of reading and child age when parents began reading to the child (Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002; Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994). Many dual language learners (DLL) rely on interactions in the second language outside the home to acquire second-language proficiency, but the HLE also influences second-language development in DLL, whether the native language or the second language is the primary home language (Duursma et al., 2007). However, little is known about the relative importance of the HLE for native- vs. second-language acquisition. This question was examined in 1,200 second-language and 8,000 native-language learners of Danish. The parents of the 3-5-year-old children completed a HLE questionnaire, and the children were assessed on a standardized language and pre-literacy battery. A total composite score of the language assessment battery was predicted using reading-related HLE factors separately for DLL and native learners. Because the predictor variables were on ordinal scales, dichotomous indicator variables for each answer were used in the multiple regression. STATAs vce-cluster was used to correct standard errors for intragroup (childcares) correlations. The results showed that the HLE predicted more variance in DLL (R2=.26) than native learners (R2=.08). Our interpretation is that the HLE is an even stronger predictor in DLL than native learners, possibly because learning two languages requires a highly stimulated language apparatus, which is facilitated by a supportive HLE irrespective of the language of the home. Burgess, S. R., Hecht, S. A., & Lonigan, C. J. (2002). Relations of the home literacy environment (HLE) to the development of reading‐related abilities: A one‐year longitudinal study. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(4), 408-426. Duursma, E., Romero-Contreras, S., Szuber, A., Proctor, P., Snow, C., August, D., & Calderón, M. (2007). The role of home literacy and language environment on bilinguals' English and Spanish vocabulary development. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(01), 171-190. Payne, A. C., Whitehurst, G. J., & Angell, A. L. (1994). The role of home literacy environment in the development of language ability in preschool children from low-income families. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 9(3-4), 427-440.

The present article reports results of a real‐world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty‐three 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20‐week storybook‐based intervention: a base intervention and two enhanced versions featuring extended professional development for educators or a home‐based program for parents. Pre‐ to posttest comparisons revealed a significant impact of all three interventions for preliteracy skills (= .21–.27) but not language skills (d = .04–.16), with little differentiation among the three variations. Fidelity, indexed by number of lessons delivered, was a significant predictor of most outcomes. Implications for real‐world research and practice are considered.

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gestures, comprehension and production of vocabulary, and grammatical complexity increased with age. Moreover, boys lagged behind girls in vocabulary production and comprehension, in grammatical complexity, and in certain types of imitation – this gender difference seems to come out more clearly in this study’s data than in data from other languages. © The Author(s) 2013, published by SAGE Publications.

Professional development (PD) is increasingly used to improve early childhood educators' skills and lcnowledge in providing quality language and emergent literacy environments for children. However, the literature does not clearly indicate the extent to which such efforts reach their goals, or whether improvements in educator outcomes translate to learning gains for children. In the current synthesis, we conducted meta-analyses to evaluate the effects of language- and literacy-focused PD on process quality, structural quality, and educator knowledge as primary outcomes. Furthermore, we estimated effects for three child outcomes: receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge. PD produced a medium effect for process quality and a large effect for structural quality but no effect for educator knowledge. PD also produced a small to medium effect for phonological awareness and a small effect for alphabet knowledge, but these were not predicted by gains in educator outcomes. Although course and coaching intensity and duration were related to effect sizes, the total number of PD components was the strongest predictor of process quality. The results suggested that PD is a viable method of improving language and literacy processes and structures in preschools, but effects may need to be substantial if they are to translate into higher child outcomes. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early gestures and symbolic actions. These lexical norms have a wide range of uses in basic research, assessment and intervention. In addition, cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development are greatly facilitated by the availability of norms from diverse languages. This report describes the development of CLEX, a new web-based cross-linguistic database for lexical data from adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. CLEX provides tools for a range of analyses within and across languages. It is designed to incorporate additional language datasets easily, and to permit users to define mappings between lexical items in pairs of languages for more specific cross-linguistic comparisons.

This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of theMacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories(CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in appropriate ways which makes it suitable for tapping into Danish children's language acquisition. The study includes 6,112 randomly selected children in the age of 0 ; 8 to 3 ; 0, and results related to the development of early gestures, comprehension and production of words as well as grammatical skills, are presented.

Bilingual children living in Denmark have been shown to vary in the extent to which they close the Danish-language gap to native speaking children during preschool age, such that children of immigrant families from non-western countries generally show a slower Danish-language acquisition than children of families from other parts of the world. The authors recently conducted two randomized control efficacy trials on language intervention for 3-6-year-olds in Danish daycares. The trials each involved 6.500 children and targeted language and literacy skills in four domains, viz. vocabulary, narrative competence, print knowledge and phonological awareness. The children participated in teacher administered soft-scripted biweekly lessons, each lasting about 30 minutes and targeting two language learning objectives each time. The results of the studies showed that children from immigrant families derived benefits that were comparable in magnitude to those of non-immigrant children (Bleses et al., under revision; Bleses et al. submitted). The first aim of the present in-depth study was to determine if, in those trials, 3-6-year-olds’ derived benefits varied across 18 specific linguistic backgrounds. A second aim was to determine if, in turn, variation in benefits was related to variation in children’s home-learning environment, which was evaluated via a detailed home-learning questionnaire. A third aim was to determine whether benefits for immigrant vs. non-immigrant children varied across type of linguistic skill, e.g., vocabulary, rhyme detection and language comprehension. The results of the study are important for understanding what hampers second-language acquisition in some groups of immigrant children but not others, and for developing future language interventions tailored to meliorate specific weaknesses in the second-language development of children.

We use a longitudinal design to examine associations for a diverse sample of 2,120 Danish 16- to 30-month-old children between early expressive vocabulary and later reading and math outcomes in the sixth grade. Educational outcomes, in particular decoding and reading comprehension, can be predicted from an early vocabulary measure as early as 16 months with effect sizes (in proportion of variance accounted for) comparable to 1 year's mean growth in reading scores. The findings confirm in a relatively large population-based study that late talkers are at risk for low educational attainment because the majority of children experiencing early language delay obtain scores below average in measures of reading in the sixth grade. Low scores have the greatest predictive power, indicating that children with early delays have elevated risk for later reading problems.

Using the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), first language acquisition of 183 Danish children has been studied longitudinally on a monthly basis (8—30 months). Focussing on production, we study early lexical development from the very first word until roughly 100 words are produced, dividing this period into the stages of first-1, -10, -25, -50 and -100 words. We analyse Danish children's first words with respect to semantic-pragmatic content, sound structure, and composition of the early lexicon based on formal linguistic categories. Comparing Danish results crosslinguistically reveals both the overall typicality of Danish children's first words as well as striking differences for some single words.

Cross-linguistic studies of early vocabulary acquisition have shown that despite a general similarity in developmental patterns, different languages are learned at different rates1,6. Danish-learning children, for instance, lag behind a number of other languages in their receptive vocabulary development, knowing about 100 fewer words at age 1;3 than children acquiring other languages. This finding has generally been attributed to the complex phonetic structure of Danish, characterized by a uniquely large inventory of vowel-like sounds. This results in indistinct syllable and word boundaries, which might hinder word segmentation and acquisition1-5. To explore this hypothesis empirically, we used online measures of language processing to investigate to what extent contoids (obstruents and nasal/lateral consonants) and vocoids (vowels and semivowels) play a differential effect on processing words in context. Using the looking-while-listening procedure7, we measured accuracy and latency of children’s gaze at yoked pairs of pictures as they listened to speech naming one of the two objects on screen. As stimuli, we selected frequently occurring Danish nouns and child-directed expressions with different vocoid-to-contoid ratios, yielding four experimental conditions in which target words and carrier phrases varied from more “consonantal” to more “vowel-like”. We hypothesized that if a higher ratio of vocoids makes word segmentation (hence processing) harder, then we would expect lower accuracy and longer processing times with vocalic target words, especially in the ‘vocoid-carrier-phrase plus vocoid-target’ condition. Our results point indeed to a differential effect of contoids and vocoids on language processing in Danish. A higher rate of vowel-like sounds in a sentence results in lower accuracy and delayed response in word recognition. These outcomes constitute early empirical evidence supporting the possibility that a complicated phonetic structure might be the reason for the observed delay in Danish-learning children’s vocabulary development.References:(1) Bleses, D., Vach, W., Slott, M., Wehberg, S., Thomsen, P., Madsen, T. & Basbøll, H. (2008). Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages: a CDI-based comparison. Journal of Child Language 35, 619–50.(2) Basbøll, H. (2005). The phonology of Danish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.(3) Bleses, D., Basbøll, H. & Vach, W. (2011). Is Danish difficult to acquire? Evidence from Nordic past tense studies. Language and CognitiveProcesses, 26(8), 1193-1231.(4) Bleses, D. & Basbøll, H. (2004). The Danish sound structure – Implications for language acquisition in normal and hearing impaired populations.In E. Schmidt, U. Mikkelsen, I. Post, J. B. Simonsen & K. Fruensgaard (eds), Brain, Hearing and Learning. 20th Danavox Symposium, 2003,165–90. Copenhagen: Holmen Center Tryk.(5) Trecca, F., Bleses, D., Christiansen, M. H., Basbøll, H., Højen, A., Madsen, T. O., & Andersen, S. R. (2014). The Effect of Vocalic vs.Consonantal Phonetic Structure on Language Segmentability: the Case of Danish. Poster session presented at IASCL - International Congress forthe Study of Child Language, Amsterdam, Holland.(6) Dale, P. & Goodman, J. (2005). Commonality and individual differences in vocabulary growth. In M. Tomasello & D. I. Slobin (eds), Beyondnature–nurture. Essays in honor of Elizabeth Bates, 41–80. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.(7) Fernald, A., Zangl, R., Portillo, A. L., & Marchman, V. A. (2008). Looking while listening: Using eye movements to monitor spoken languagecomprehension by infants and young children. In I. Sekerina, E. Fernández, & H. Clahsen (Eds.), Language processing in children. Benjamins:Amsterdam.

Purpose This study investigated the feasibility and potential validity of an item response theory (IRT)–based computerized adaptive testing (CAT) version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words & Sentences (CDI:WS; Fenson et al., 2007) vocabulary checklist, with the objective of reducing length while maintaining measurement precision. Method Parent-reported vocabulary for the American CDI:WS norming sample consisting of 1,461 children between the ages of 16 and 30 months was used to investigate the fit of the items to the 2-parameter logistic IRT model and to simulate CDI-CAT versions with 400, 200, 100, 50, 25, 10, and 5 items. Results All but 14 items fit the 2-parameter logistic IRT model, and real data simulations of CDI-CATs with at least 50 items recovered full CDI scores with correlations over .95. Furthermore, the CDI-CATs with at least 50 items had similar correlations with age and socioeconomic status as the full CDI:WS. Conclusion These results provide strong evidence that a CAT version of the CDI:WS has the potential to reduce length while maintaining the accuracy and precision of the full instrument.

The present study examines the complex interactions between the spoken and the written language in twenty Funish children’s oral and written narratives and a read out task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. First, a comparison of the distribution of the reduction phenomena in the children’s language across the two spoken conditions was made. The second analysis looked at the distribution of spelling errors in the written narratives with respect to sound and reduction related errors both at a general and individual level. Finally, a qualitative analysis of three children’s distribution of the large weak class was performed to evaluate a possible interaction between the children’s three registers: spontaneous speech, reading and writing. The results indicated that (a) there was a significant difference in the distribution of forms across the two spoken modalities, e.g. schwa-assimilations and schwa-drop and Funish forms occurred less in the read out condition than in the spoken narratives; (b) spelling errors were predominately sound related and could be explained as either related to the opaque phoneme to grapheme relation in Danish or to reduction phenomena in the children’s own language; (c) furthermore, there was a significant correlation between spelling errors and a high frequency of reduced forms in the read out condition indicating a close relation between these two modalities.