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<div class=""><h1 id="page-title" class="">Early vocabulary delays suggest therapy needs later in life</h1></div><div class="">by Kristie Auman-Bauer</div><div class="">December 1, 2015</div> </div>
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<div class=""><div class=""><div class=""><p>A
toddler’s vocabulary delays may indicate a future need for speech
language therapy, but race and home language can play a role in
obtaining these services, according to a recent Penn State study.</p>
<p>The study, published last month in the <a href="http://ajslp.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2471589">American Journal of Speech Language Policy</a>, includes analysis led by a Penn State researcher Paul L. Morgan, associate professor of <a href="https://www.ed.psu.edu/eps/">education policy studies</a>.
Morgan said there is an ongoing debate in the speech and language
pathology field about whether being a late talker is a risk factor for
later development.</p>
<p>“We analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of 10,000
children born in the U.S. in 2001. The data included surveys of the size
of the children’s oral vocabularies at two years of age, as well as
untimed, individualized assessments of their reading and mathematics
achievement at four and five years of age,” Morgan explained.</p>
<p>Morgan and his research team found that vocabulary delays by two
years of age were predictive of a child receiving speech and language
services between two and five years. When comparing identification data
by race and ethnicity, minority children were consistently less likely
to receive those services compared to otherwise similar white children
at the same ages. </p>
<p>“Our analysis indicates that the likelihood of black children
receiving speech or language therapy services was about 45 to 60 percent
lower than white children who were otherwise similar across many other
background characteristics, including in their oral vocabularies,
academic achievement, behavior, and family income,” said Morgan.</p>
<p>The researchers observed sizeable disparities in services received,
whether the children were two, four, or five years old. Hispanic
children’s lower likelihood of receiving speech or language therapy
services was statistically explained by a language other than English
being used in the home.</p>
<p>“Our research suggests that one way to reduce children’s need for
costly services later in life, including special education services, may
involve preventing or remediating vocabulary gaps as early as two years
of age,” said Morgan. “Our findings also suggest the need to increase
culturally sensitive or language specific practices to ensure that
minority children with speech or language impairments are being
appropriately identified and remediated.”</p>
<p>Additional research by Morgan indicates children who receive services
for speech and language impairments benefit from improved
communications abilities, particularly if the therapy starts before
school entry. “We’ve found that children are helped even further as they
progress through the educational system if the therapy is ongoing,”
Morgan explained.</p>
<p>Early screenings and intervention efforts can also reap other
benefits. “We’ve shown that the size of two-year-old children’s oral
vocabularies uniquely predicts their academic and behavioral preparation
for kindergarten,” said Morgan. “Children with larger oral vocabularies
at age two were better at both reading and math, and excelled in other
areas such as self-regulation, attention span, and task persistence.”</p>
<p>Penn State colleagues Marianne Hillemeier, professor of health policy
and administration and demography, and Steve Maczuga, research
programmer and analyst for Penn State's <a href="http://www.pop.psu.edu/">Population Research Institute</a> in the <a href="http://www.ssri.psu.edu/">Social Science Research Institute</a>,
contributed to the project. Other researchers included George Farkas,
professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, and
Carol Scheffner Hammer, professor of communication science at Columbia
University.</p>
<p>The National Center for Special Education Research's Institute of
Education Sciences, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institutes of
Health supported this work.</p>
<a href="http://news.psu.edu/story/382921/2015/12/01/research/early-vocabulary-delays-suggest-therapy-needs-later-life">http://news.psu.edu/story/382921/2015/12/01/research/early-vocabulary-delays-suggest-therapy-needs-later-life</a><br></div></div></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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