Publications by authors named "Jamie Lingwood"

Face mask wearing was an important preventative strategy for the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. However, the effects that occluding the mouth and nose area with surgical masks could have on young children's language processing and emotion recognition skills have received little investigation. To evaluate the possible effects, the current study recruited a sample of 74 children from the North West of England (aged 4-8 years).

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Article Synopsis
  • Effective shared book reading relies on strong engagement between adults and children for optimal language development.
  • A mixed-methods study found that higher engagement led to more occurrences of joint attention and caregiver prompts, but most language-boosting behaviors were consistent regardless of engagement levels.
  • Qualitative analysis suggested that specific speech acts by caregivers may enhance children's engagement when paired with other interaction factors.
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Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate adjectives and nouns, and may instead over-rely on noun information when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Thorpe, Baumgartner, & Fernald, 2006). This disjointed processing has implications for pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives from making contrastive inferences (Huang & Snedeker, 2013).

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Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition.

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Wayfinding is the ability to learn and recall a route through an environment. Theories of wayfinding suggest that for children to learn a route successfully, they must have repeated experience of it, but in this experiment we investigated whether children could learn a route after only a single experience of the route. A total of 80 participants from the United Kingdom in four groups of 20 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were shown a route through a 12-turn maze in a virtual environment.

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The case for psychosocial interventions in relation to chronic pain, one of the most common health issues in contemporary healthcare, is well-established as a means of managing the emotional and psychological difficulties experienced by sufferers. Using mixed methods, this study compared a standard therapy for chronic pain, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a specific literature-based intervention, shared reading (SR) developed by national charity, The Reader. A 5-week CBT group and a 22-week SR group for patients with chronic pain ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT.

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Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities.

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