Parents Fine-Tune Their Speech to Children's Vocabulary Knowledge.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Leung A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8641142 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:PURPOSE:The present study examined the impact of environmental factors (socioeconomic status [SES], the percent of language exposure to English and to Spanish, and primary caregivers' vocabulary knowledge) on bilingual children's vocabulary skills. METHOD:Vocabulary skills were measured in 58 bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 7 who spoke Spanish as their native language and English as their second language. Data related to language environment in the home, specifically, the percent of language exposure to each language and SES, were obtained from primary caregiver interviews. Primary caregivers' vocabulary knowledge was measured directly using expressive and receptive vocabulary assessments in both languages. RESULTS:Multiple regression analyses indicated that primary caregivers' vocabulary knowledge, the child's percent exposure to each language, and SES were robust predictors of children's English, but not Spanish, vocabulary skills. CONCLUSION:These findings indicate that in the early school ages, primary caregiver vocabulary skills have a stronger impact on bilingual children's second-language than native-language vocabulary.
| S-EPMC4632841 | biostudies-literature
Project description:OBJECTIVES:To describe the epidemiology and parent-child concordance of hearing, speech reception, vocabulary and language in Australian parent-child dyads at child age 11 to 12 years. DESIGN:Population-based cross-sectional study (Child Health CheckPoint) nested within the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. SETTING:Assessment centres in seven Australian cities and eight regional towns or home visits around Australia, February 2015 to March 2016. PARTICIPANTS:Of all participating CheckPoint families (n=1874), 1516 children (50% female) and 1520 parents (87% mothers, mean age 43.8 years) undertook at least one of four measurements of hearing and language. OUTCOME MEASURES:Hearing threshold (better ear mean of 1, 2 and 4 kHz) from pure-tone audiometry, speech reception threshold, receptive vocabulary, expressive and receptive languages using a sentence repetition task. Parent-child concordance was examined using Pearson's correlation coefficients and adjusted linear regression models. Survey weights and methods accounted for Longitudinal Study of Australian Children's complex sampling and stratification. RESULTS:Children had a similar speech reception threshold to parents (children mean -14.3, SD 2.4; parents -14.9, SD 3.2 dB) but better hearing acuity (children 8.3, SD 6.3; parents 13.4, SD 7.0 decibels hearing level). Standardised sentence repetition scores were similar (children 9.8, SD 2.9; parents 9.1, SD 3.3) but, as expected, parents had superior receptive vocabularies. Parent-child correlations were higher for the cognitively-based language measures (vocabulary 0.31, 95% CI 0.26 to 0.36; sentence repetition 0.29, 95% CI 0.24 to 0.34) than the auditory measures (hearing 0.18, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.23; speech reception threshold 0.18, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.22). Mother-child and father-child concordances were similar for all measures. CONCLUSIONS:We provide population reference values for multiple measures spanning auditory and verbal communication systems in children and mid-life adults. Concordance values aligned with previous twin studies and offspring studies in adults, in keeping with polygenic heritability that is modest for audition but around 60% for language by late childhood.
| S-EPMC6624023 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose:We examined the effects of vocabulary, lexical characteristics (age of acquisition and phonotactic probability), and auditory access (aided audibility and daily hearing aid [HA] use) on speech perception skills in children with HAs. Method:Participants included 24 children with HAs and 25 children with normal hearing (NH), ages 5-12 years. Groups were matched on age, expressive and receptive vocabulary, articulation, and nonverbal working memory. Participants repeated monosyllabic words and nonwords in noise. Stimuli varied on age of acquisition, lexical frequency, and phonotactic probability. Performance in each condition was measured by the signal-to-noise ratio at which the child could accurately repeat 50% of the stimuli. Results:Children from both groups with larger vocabularies showed better performance than children with smaller vocabularies on nonwords and late-acquired words but not early-acquired words. Overall, children with HAs showed poorer performance than children with NH. Auditory access was not associated with speech perception for the children with HAs. Conclusions:Children with HAs show deficits in sensitivity to phonological structure but appear to take advantage of vocabulary skills to support speech perception in the same way as children with NH. Further investigation is needed to understand the causes of the gap that exists between the overall speech perception abilities of children with HAs and children with NH.
| S-EPMC5829804 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHeavy schoolbags and their adverse musculoskeletal effects are a cause of great concern. Parents' awareness and knowledge about this are crucial to prevent such health problems. Thus, this study aimed to assess parents' perceptions, knowledge, and attitudes regarding children's schoolbags and related musculoskeletal health.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted targeting parents with children of school age. In January 2015, a self-administered, validated questionnaire was distributed to all participants, consisting of questions about their awareness, knowledge, and attitude regarding the negative effects of carrying inappropriate schoolbags on children's musculoskeletal health.ResultA total of 616 parents (284 fathers and 332 mothers) completed the questionnaire (response rate of 100%). A total of 247 (87.3%) fathers and 301 (90.9%) mothers knew that carrying heavy schoolbags produces back problems. However, only 105 (36.9%) fathers and 107 (37.6%) mothers knew that incorrect schoolbag weight and inadequate way to carry it may impede the normal alignment and growth of the spine. Only 107 (37.6%) fathers and 96 (28.9%) mothers knew the ideal weight of the schoolbag, while 49.6% of fathers and 42.8% of mothers did not check their children's schoolbags for unnecessary contents.ConclusionAwareness of parents about the consequences of heavy schoolbags and correct use is still limited and suboptimal. Educational sessions for parents and awareness campaigns may help to reduce the prevalence of musculoskeletal health problems among children.
| S-EPMC6487022 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Artificial neural networks (ANN) have become the mainstream acoustic modeling technique for large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR). A conventional ANN features a multi-layer architecture that requires massive amounts of computation. The brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNN) closely mimic the biological neural networks and can operate on low-power neuromorphic hardware with spike-based computation. Motivated by their unprecedented energy-efficiency and rapid information processing capability, we explore the use of SNNs for speech recognition. In this work, we use SNNs for acoustic modeling and evaluate their performance on several large vocabulary recognition scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate competitive ASR accuracies to their ANN counterparts, while require only 10 algorithmic time steps and as low as 0.68 times total synaptic operations to classify each audio frame. Integrating the algorithmic power of deep SNNs with energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware, therefore, offer an attractive solution for ASR applications running locally on mobile and embedded devices.
| S-EPMC7090229 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Music and speech are often cited as characteristically human forms of communication. Both share the features of hierarchical structure, complex sound systems, and sensorimotor sequencing demands, and both are used to convey and influence emotions, among other functions [1]. Both music and speech also prominently use acoustical frequency modulations, perceived as variations in pitch, as part of their communicative repertoire. Given these similarities, and the fact that pitch perception and production involve the same peripheral transduction system (cochlea) and the same production mechanism (vocal tract), it might be natural to assume that pitch processing in speech and music would also depend on the same underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. In this essay we argue that the processing of pitch information differs significantly for speech and music; specifically, we suggest that there are two pitch-related processing systems, one for more coarse-grained, approximate analysis and one for more fine-grained accurate representation, and that the latter is unique to music. More broadly, this dissociation offers clues about the interface between sensory and motor systems, and highlights the idea that multiple processing streams are a ubiquitous feature of neuro-cognitive architectures.
| S-EPMC3409119 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mechanosensitive ion channels rely on membrane composition to transduce physical stimuli into electrical signals. The Piezo1 channel mediates mechanoelectrical transduction and regulates crucial physiological processes, including vascular architecture and remodeling, cell migration, and erythrocyte volume. The identity of the membrane components that modulate Piezo1 function remain largely unknown. Using lipid profiling analyses, we here identify dietary fatty acids that tune Piezo1 mechanical response. We find that margaric acid, a saturated fatty acid present in dairy products and fish, inhibits Piezo1 activation and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), present in fish oils, modulate channel inactivation. Force measurements reveal that margaric acid increases membrane bending stiffness, whereas PUFAs decrease it. We use fatty acid supplementation to abrogate the phenotype of gain-of-function Piezo1 mutations causing human dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis. Beyond Piezo1, our findings demonstrate that cell-intrinsic lipid profile and changes in the fatty acid metabolism can dictate the cell's response to mechanical cues.
| S-EPMC6416271 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Purpose Prior studies report conflicting descriptions of the relationships between phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and speech perception in preschoolers with speech disorders. This study sought to determine the nature of these relationships in a sample of school-aged children with residual speech sound errors affecting /ɹ/. Method Participants included 110 children aged 7;0-17;4 (years;months) with residual errors impacting /ɹ/. Data on perceptual acuity and perceptual bias in an /ɹ/ identification task, receptive vocabulary, and PA were obtained. A theoretically and empirically motivated path model was constructed with vocabulary mediating the relationship between two measures of speech perception and PA. Model parameters were determined through maximum likelihood estimation with standard errors that were robust to nonnormality. Monte Carlo simulation was used to examine achieved power at the current sample size. Results The saturated path model explained 19% of the variance in PA. The direct path between age-adjusted perceptual acuity and PA was significant, as was the direct path between vocabulary and PA. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was no evidence in the current sample that vocabulary skill mediated the relationship between speech perception and PA. Each individual path was adequately powered at the current sample size. Conclusions The overall model provided evidence for a continued relationship between speech perception, measured by perceptual acuity of the sound in error, and PA in school-aged children with residual speech errors. Thus, measures of speech perception remain relevant to the assessment of school-aged children and adolescents in this population. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13641275.
| S-EPMC8632510 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mechanical force applied along a disulfide bond alters its rate of reduction. We here aimed at quantifying the direct effect of force onto the chemical reactivity of a sulfur-sulfur bond in contrast to indirect, e.g., steric or mechanistic, influences. To this end, we evaluated the dependency of a disulfide bond's redox potential on a pulling force applied along the system. Our QM/MM simulations of cystine as a model system take conformational dynamics and explicit solvation into account and show that redox potentials increase over the whole range of forces probed here (30-3320 pN), and thus even in the absence of a significant disulfide bond elongation (<500 pN). Instead, at low forces, dihedrals and angles, as the softer degrees of freedom are stretched, contribute to the destabilization of the oxidized state. We find physiological forces to be likely to tune the disulfide's redox potentials to an extent similar to the tuning within proteins by point mutations.
| S-EPMC3274805 | biostudies-other
Project description:In budding yeast, the highly conserved small GTPase Cdc42 localizes to the cortex at a cell pole and orchestrates the trafficking and deposition of cell surface materials required for building a bud or mating projection (shmoo). Using a combination of quantitative imaging and mathematical modeling, we elucidate mechanisms of dynamic recycling of Cdc42 that balance diffusion. Rdi1, a guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor (GDI), mediates a fast recycling pathway, while actin patch-mediated endocytosis accounts for a slower one. These recycling mechanisms are restricted to the same region of the nascent bud, as both are coupled to the Cdc42 GTPase cycle. We find that a single dynamic parameter, the rate of internalization inside the window of polarized delivery, is tuned to give rise to distinct shapes of Cdc42 distributions that correlate with distinct morphogenetic fates, such as the formation of a round bud or a pointed shmoo.
| S-EPMC2805562 | biostudies-literature