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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Temperamental And Joint Attentional Predictors Of Language Development, Brenda J. Salley, Wallace E. Dixon Jr.
Temperamental And Joint Attentional Predictors Of Language Development, Brenda J. Salley, Wallace E. Dixon Jr.
ETSU Faculty Works
Individual differences in child temperament have been associated with individual differences in language development. Similarly, relationships have been reported between early nonverbal social communication (joint attention) and both temperament and language. The present study examined whether individual differences in joint attention might mediate temperament-language relationships. Temperament, language, and joint attention were assessed in 51 21-month-olds. Results indicated an inverse relationship between aspects of temperamental difficulty, including low executive control and high negative affect, and language development. Temperamental aspects of negative affect were also inversely predictive of joint attention. However, the utility of a model in which joint attention mediates the …
Temperament, Distraction, And Learning In Toddlerhood, Wallace E. Dixon Jr., Brenda J. Salley, Andrea D. Clements
Temperament, Distraction, And Learning In Toddlerhood, Wallace E. Dixon Jr., Brenda J. Salley, Andrea D. Clements
ETSU Faculty Works
The word- and nonword-learning abilities of toddlers were tested under various conditions of environmental distraction, and evaluated with respect to children's temperamental attentional focus. Thirty-nine children and their mothers visited the lab at child age 21-months, where children were exposed to fast-mapping word-learning trials and nonlinguistic sequential learning trials. It was found that both word- and nonword-learning were adversely affected by the presentation of environmental distractions. But it was also found that the effect of the distractions sometimes depended on children's level of attentional focus. Specifically, children high in attentional focus were less affected by environmental distractions than children low …