Testing Schedule:
Participants will be tested individually, in a quiet location within the school or classroom. Testing will occur across four phases, beginning in late Kindergarten or early Year 1, and continuing every 6 months until mid-late Year 2.
Not all methods will be used at every time point of the project. All methods have been used by us in similar studies, and so are tried and tested and very child-friendly.
STANDARDISED MEASURES OF LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND COGNITION
These are widely-used measures of children’s development, and are produced by publishing companies such as Pearson Assessment. The measures typically take between 10-15 minutes to complete, and will be used at varying points throughout the project (i.e., not necessarily in the same testing session).
The measures we will use throughout the project are:
- Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) (Dunn & Dunn, 2007): a test of vocabulary for children aged 3 years and above. The PPVT simply requires children to point at pictures in response to questions such as “where is the dog?”
- TROG-2 (Bishop, 2003): a test of grammar for children aged 4 years and above. Just like the PPVT, the TROG-2 requires children to point to pictures that match sentences spoken by the experimenter.
- Working Memory: The Listening Span subtest of the Children’s Working Memory Test Battery (Gathercole & Pickering, 2001) will be used to measure children’s complex Working Memory span. In the task, children hear a series of sentences (e.g., ‘The sky is blue’, ‘Grass is red’, and are asked to (i) comment on their truth value of each, and (ii) remember and recall the last word in every sentence (e.g., ‘blue’, ‘red’).
- Ravens Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) (Raven, 1998): The RCPM is a test of non- verbal pattern finding ability for children aged 4 years and up. In the task the child is introduced to an incomplete visual puzzle and is asked to complete the puzzle by selecting the correct missing piece from an array of 6. An example is shown below.
- Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-4 (CELF-4, Australian and New Zealand Edition) (Wiig, Secord, & Semel, 2006): a general language measure for children aged 5 years and above. The CELF provides a broad-based assessment of children’s comprehension and production of English vocabulary and grammar. Children engage in a range of short tasks, such as repeating sentences and defining words.
- Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT, 4th edition) (Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006): The test measures alphabetic and printed word knowledge by asking children to read aloud letters and words of increasing difficulty.
EXPERIMENTAL LANGUAGE TASKS: Grammar Comprehension and Production
A core component of the project will be to measure specific aspects of children’s growing grammatical language. To do this we will measure children’s comprehension and production. An example of one comprehension task item is given below.
For this item a test sentence might be “Which horse is being hugged by the pig?”
The production task uses similar pictures, but this time children listen to the experimenter describing one picture (e.g., “The pig is being hugged by the horse”), and children would then be asked to describe an unrelated picture in any way they choose. For instance, they might be shown a picture like this:
Here we are interested in whether children use the same structure as the experimenter (e.g., “the rabbit was kissed by the sheep”), or whether they use a different structure (e.g., “the sheep kissed the bunny”).
The comprehension and production tasks typically take around 15 minutes to complete.
EXPERIMENTAL COGNITIVE TASKS: Statistical Learning
Children will complete tasks that measure their ability to identify visual and auditory patterns in sequences.
In the visual pattern detection task, the child see a series of “aliens from outer space” appear one at a time on a computer screen. They are asked to press the space bar of the computer every time they see the same character appear twice in a row. A sample of characters is shown below.
The characters appear in a pre-defined sequence, which the children don’t know ahead of time. Once children have been exposed to this sequence for 5 minutes, we tell them there was a pattern and ask them if they can identify parts of it.
The auditory pattern detection task follows the same format, except that in this task children hear a sequence of syllables (e.g., ba-ri-ko-tu-we-si …), which also follows a predefined pattern (i.e., some syllables always occur with each other), and children are asked to identify the pattern.
We have successfully used tasks like these in our past research (e.g., Arciuli & Simpson, 2012; Kidd & Arciuli, 2016), and have found that they are related to children’s language and literacy development.
The statistical learning tasks typically take around 20 minutes to complete.
ANU Language Lab 