Lexico-semantic abilities in early language growth and delay

项目总结： 患有语言障碍的儿童面临着一系列负面的健康和学习后果的风险，以及 至少占学龄人口的7%。该项目解决了两个关键的公共卫生需求 关于语言障碍：(1)表征早期词汇-语义技能轨迹，目标是(2) 提高早期识别能力。我们集中在几个有前景的评估词汇语义能力在 学龄儿童，因为词汇语义技能是语言的一个组成部分，对学龄儿童有影响 发育性语言障碍，也可以可靠地在蹒跚学步的儿童中测量。我们建议招聘一名 一大群18个月大的幼儿，他们有不同的语言能力和背景，然后跟随 这些儿童纵向评估是否以及如何在三个主要词汇语义技能(结构， 学习和处理)可以预测4岁时的语言结果，此时临床语言障碍状态可能 初步评估。为了充分表征早期技能和轨迹如何导致后来的结果，我们进行了 关于儿童技能与创建细节模型之间并发关系和预测关系的几点分析 早期词汇。这个项目将通过评估程度来提高我们检测早期语言障碍的能力 识别已知词义和新词词义之间关系的早期技能可能对此起到作用 是较长期语言延迟的标志。

Project Summary: Children with language disorders are at risk for a host of negative health and academic consequences, and represent at least 7% of the school-aged population. This project addresses two critical public-health needs regarding language disorders: (1) Characterizing early lexico-semantic skill trajectories with the goal of (2) Improving early identification. We focus on several promising assessments of lexico-semantic abilities in toddlers, as lexico-semantic skills are a component of language which is affected in school-age children with developmental language disorders, and can also be reliably measured in toddlers. We propose to recruit a large group of 18-month-old toddlers with a diverse set of language abilities and backgrounds and then follow these children longitudinally to assess whether and how growth in three main lexico-semantic skills (structure, learning, and processing) predicts language outcomes at age 4, when clinical language disorder status can initially be assessed. To fully characterize how early skills and trajectories lead to later outcomes, we carry out several analyses on concurrent and predictive relations between skills and create detailed models of children's early lexicons. This project will advance our ability to detect early language disorders by evaluating the degree to which early skills in recognizing relationships between known and novel word meanings might serve as a marker of longer-term language delays.