Publications by authors named "Adriana Weisleder"

A large number of children are exposed to more than one language. One well-established method of assessing early vocabulary development in monolingual children is parent report; however, its use in bilingual/multilingual contexts is less established and brings unique challenges. In this methodological scoping review, we reviewed studies of early vocabulary development using parent report with bilingual/multilingual children (January 1980-March 2022).

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Early vocabulary development is crucial for future cognitive and academic outcomes, and parent-child booksharing has been recognized as a powerful home literacy practice to promote word learning. However, evidence about the link between booksharing and language development in diverse cultural and socioeconomic settings is currently limited, hindering the formulation of a broadly applicable framework to understand the favorable conditions for early vocabulary development. This study explores the relationship between booksharing and early receptive and expressive vocabulary in a sample of 183 mothers and their toddlers in Costa Rica, a context where reading is not a common practice and children have limited access to books.

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Background: The Video Interaction Project (VIP) is a healthcare-based intervention that provides real-time video-feedback of parent-child play and reading interactions to families with children aged 0 to 36 months. Although evidence from randomized controlled trials demonstrates improved early relational health, including responsive parenting, after three to five VIP visits, the minimal effective dose in real-world implementations is unknown. This study aimed to determine the minimal effective dose of VIP during a real-world implementation for changing responsive parenting behaviors.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The CDC has revised its child development milestones to help monitor language development, specifically looking at expressive vocabulary as a key indicator.
  • - A review of the methods used to establish these milestones revealed that the evidence is often conflicting or missing, and the samples studied do not accurately represent U.S. children.
  • - The findings underscore the need for more extensive and culturally inclusive research to develop reliable and accurate developmental milestones for expressive vocabulary in U.S. children.
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Considerable evidence demonstrates the importance of the cognitive home environment in supporting children's language, cognition, and school readiness more broadly. This is particularly important for children from low-income backgrounds, as cognitive stimulation is a key area of resilience that mediates the impact of poverty on child development. Researchers and clinicians have therefore highlighted the need to quantify cognitive stimulation; however existing methodological approaches frequently utilize home visits and/or labor-intensive observations and coding.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on late talkers (LTs), children who have language development delays but no known causes, and compares their language processing skills to typical talkers (TTs).
  • Using an eye-tracking method, researchers observed how 2-year-old LTs and TTs reacted to visual stimuli while hearing words that referred to those images.
  • Results showed both groups were sensitive to semantic relationships, indicating that LTs, despite having smaller vocabularies, still understand and process language similarly to TTs.
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Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning.

Method: English-acquiring U.S.

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Article Synopsis
  • Late talkers are children who have delayed language skills without any known cause and show specific challenges in expressing sounds.
  • The study compared 23 typical talkers and 22 late talkers to see how well they noticed when words were mispronounced using a Looking-While-Listening task.
  • Both late talkers and typical talkers recognized mispronunciations but showed no significant differences in the length of time they looked at the correctly pronounced words versus mispronounced words.
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Purpose The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech.

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Objectives: In this study, we examined (1) whether a reading aloud intervention, Universidade do Bebê (UBB), had impacts on self-regulation; (2) whether effects on child outcomes were mediated by self-regulation; and (3) whether effects of UBB were explained through a sequential pathway of impact, including cognitive stimulation in the home, parent-child interactive reading, and self-regulation.

Methods: We performed a cluster randomized controlled trial of UBB in child care centers serving low-income children (mean age 37.4 months; SD = 6.

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Background And Objectives: Heterogeneity in risk among low-income families suggests the need for tiered interventions to prevent disparities in school readiness. Smart Beginnings (SB) integrates two interventions: Video Interaction Project (VIP) (birth to 3 years), delivered universally to low-income families in pediatric primary care, and Family Check-Up (6 months to 3 years), targeted home visiting for families with additional family risks. Our objective was to assess initial SB impacts on parent-child activities and interactions at 6 months, reflecting early VIP exposure.

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Laboratory observations are a mainstay of language development research, but transcription is costly. We test whether speech recognition technology originally designed for day-long contexts can be usefully applied to this use-case. We compared automated adult word and child vocalization counts from Language Environment Analysis (LENATM) to those of transcribers in 20-minute play sessions with Spanish-speaking dyads (n = 104) at 1;7 and 2;2.

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Recent advances in large-scale data storage and processing offer unprecedented opportunities for behavioral scientists to collect and analyze naturalistic data, including from underrepresented groups. Audio data, particularly real-world audio recordings, are of particular interest to behavioral scientists because they provide high-fidelity access to subtle aspects of daily life and social interactions. However, these methodological advances pose novel risks to research participants and communities.

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Objective: Feeding concerns are common in the first 2 years of life and typically reflect maternal perceptions occurring within the larger context of the parent-child relationship. We aimed to determine whether (1) maternal depressive systems predicted perceived picky eating, mediated by maternal negative perceptions; (2) receipt of the Video Interaction Project (VIP) parenting intervention impacted perceived picky eating through this pathway; and (3) perceived picky eating was associated with child growth or subsequent dietary patterns.

Methods: We performed a partial longitudinal analysis of 187 low-income, predominantly Hispanic mother-child dyads enrolled in a randomized controlled trial of the VIP.

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Objective: To investigate pathways by which interventions that promote shared reading and play help prevent child behavior problems. We examined whether family processes associated with the family investment pathway (eg, parental cognitive stimulation) and the family stress pathway (eg, mothers' psychosocial functioning) mediated impacts of a pediatric-based preventive intervention on child behavior.

Study Design: The sample included 362 low-income mothers and their children who participated in a randomized controlled trial of the Video Interaction Project, a pediatrics-based preventive intervention that promotes parent-child interactions in the context of shared reading and play.

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Objective: To determine the early impacts of pediatric primary care parenting interventions on parent cognitive stimulation in low socioeconomic status families and whether these impacts are sustained up to 1.5 years after program completion.

Study Design: This randomized controlled trial included assignment to 1 of 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP] or Building Blocks) or to a control group.

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Objectives: To determine impacts on social-emotional development at school entry of a pediatric primary care intervention (Video Interaction Project [VIP]) promoting positive parenting through reading aloud and play, delivered in 2 phases: infant through toddler (VIP birth to 3 years [VIP 0-3]) and preschool-age (VIP 3 to 5 years [VIP 3-5]).

Methods: Factorial randomized controlled trial with postpartum enrollment and random assignment to VIP 0-3, control 0 to 3 years, and a third group without school entry follow-up (Building Blocks) and 3-year second random assignment of VIP 0-3 and control 0 to 3 years to VIP 3-5 or control 3 to 5 years. In the VIP, a bilingual facilitator video recorded the parent and child reading and/or playing using provided learning materials and reviewed videos to reinforce positive interactions.

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Objectives: Many children in low- and middle-income countries fail to reach their developmental potential. We sought to determine if a parenting program focused on the promotion of reading aloud enhanced parent-child interactions and child development among low-income families in northern Brazil.

Methods: This was a cluster-randomized study of educational child care centers randomly assigned to receive an additional parenting program (intervention) or standard child care without a parenting component (control).

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Objective: To determine whether educational media as actually used by low-income families promote parent-child cognitive stimulation activities.

Methods: We performed secondary analysis of the control group of a longitudinal cohort of mother-infant dyads enrolled postpartum in an urban public hospital. Educational media exposure (via a 24-hour recall diary) and parent-child activities that may promote cognitive stimulation in the home (using StimQ) were assessed at 6, 14, 24, and 36 months.

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We sought to determine impacts of a pediatric primary care intervention, the Video Interaction Project, on 3-year trajectories of parenting stress related to parent-child interactions in low socioeconomic status (SES) families. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was conducted, with random assignment to one of two interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP]; Building Blocks [BB]) or control (C). As part of VIP, dyads attended one-on-one sessions with an interventionist who facilitated interactions in play and shared reading through review of videotaped parent-child interactions made on primary care visit days; learning materials and parenting pamphlets were also provided to facilitate parent-child interactions at home.

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Poverty related disparities in early child development and school readiness are a major public health crisis, the prevention of which has emerged in recent years as a national priority. Interventions targeting parenting and the quality of the early home language environment are at the forefront of efforts to address these disparities. In this article we discuss the innovative use of the pediatric primary care platform as part of a comprehensive public health strategy to prevent adverse child development outcomes through the promotion of parenting.

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Objective: The goal of this study was to determine what effects pediatric primary care interventions, focused on promotion of positive parenting through reading aloud and play, have on the socioemotional development of toddlers from low-income, primarily immigrant households.

Methods: This randomized controlled trial included random assignment to 1 of 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP] or Building Blocks [BB]) or to a control group. Mother-newborn dyads were enrolled postpartum in an urban public hospital.

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Objectives: As part of a large randomized controlled trial, the authors assessed the impact of 2 early primary care parenting interventions-the Video Interaction Project (VIP) and Building Blocks (BB)-on the use of physical punishment among low-income parents of toddlers. They also determined whether the impact was mediated through increases in responsive parenting and decreases in maternal psychosocial risk.

Methods: Four hundred thirty-eight mother-child dyads (161 VIP, 113 BB, 164 Control) were assessed when the children were 14 and/or 24 months old.

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We studied associations between 2 pediatric primary care interventions promoting parental responsiveness and maternal depressive symptoms among low-income mothers. This randomized controlled trial included 2 interventions (Video Interaction Project [VIP], Building Blocks [BB]) and a control group. VIP is a relationship-based intervention, using video-recordings of mother-child dyads to reinforce interactional strengths.

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