Publications

Abstract

Background

Developmental delay (DD) poses challenges to children's overall development, necessitating early detection and intervention. Existing screening tools in China focus mainly on children with developmental issues in two or more domains, diagnosed as global developmental delay (GDD). However, the recent rise of early childhood development (ECD) concepts has expanded the focus to include not only those with severe brain development impairments but also children who lag in specific domains due to various social-environmental factors, with the aim of promoting positive development through active intervention. To support this approach, corresponding screening tools need to be developed.
Methods

The current study used a two-phase design to develop and validate the Parent-Reported Indicator of Developmental Evaluation for Chinese Children (PRIDE) tool. In Phase 1, age-specific milestone forms for PRIDE were created through a survey conducted in urban and rural primary care clinics across four economic regions in China. In Phase 2, PRIDE was validated in a community-based sample. Sensitivity and specificity of both PRIDE and Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQ)-3 were estimated using inverse probability weights (IPW) and multiple imputation (MI) to address planned and unplanned missing data.
Results

In Phase 1 involving a total of 1160 participants aged 1 to 48 months, 63 items were selected from the initial item pool to create 10 age-specific PRIDE forms. Our Phase 2 study included 777 children within the same age range. PRIDE demonstrated an estimated sensitivity and specificity of 83.3% [95% confidence interval (CI): 56.8%–100.0%] and 84.9% (95% CI: 82.8%–86.9%) in the identification of DD.
Conclusion

The findings suggest that PRIDE holds promise as a sensitive tool for detecting DD in community settings.

Abstract

The present article examines the proposal that typology is a major factor guiding transfer selectivity in L3/Ln acquisition. We tested first exposure in L3/Ln using two artificial languages (ALs) lexically based in English and Spanish, focusing on gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and between nouns and adjectives. 50 L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers took part in the experiment. After receiving implicit training in one of the ALs (Mini-Spanish, N = 26; Mini-English, N = 24), gender violations elicited a fronto-lateral negativity in Mini-English in the earliest time window (200–500 ms), although this was not followed by any other differences in subsequent periods. This effect was highly localized, surfacing only in electrodes of the right-anterior region. In contrast, gender violations in Mini-Spanish elicited a broadly distributed positivity in the 300–600 ms time window. While we do not find typical indices of grammatical processing such as the P600 component, we believe that the between-groups differential appearance of the positivity for gender violations in the 300–600 ms time window reflects differential allocation of attentional resources as a function of the ALs’ lexical similarity to English or Spanish. We take these differences in attention to be precursors of the processes involved in transfer source selection in L3/Ln.