Cognitive Skills in Children with DLD

We have administered 6 different cognitive tasks to more than 300 children, aged 5-7 years. We have included many children who speak only English or both Spanish and English -- over 100 in each of these groups! We've also been adding more children who speak Vietnamese and English to our sample of participants. 

We have developed open-access versions of our cognitive tasks, so that professionals outside the research community can use them. These task versions have been created in Python, a free programming language. At the 2024 Minnesota State Fair, we recruited over 100 children to find out whether our new (free) tasks perform the same way our existing tasks do.

Our tasks are less-biased for children who speak languages in addition to English. Children who speak both Spanish and English perform similarly to children who speak only English on the tasks. Also, the amount of exposure to Spanish they have does not seem to matter, and children who speak Spanish perform similarly to those who speak Vietnamese. This is important because the amount of exposure a child has to a language other than English does impact their performance on the tasks we usually use for language assessments.

Our cognitive tasks are reliable, which means that each task is consistent in what it measures. We have shown that each task gives similar scores when a child completes it on two different days. We have also shown that each task measures one skill consistently throughout the whole task. Showing our tasks are reliable is an important step, because unreliable tasks are not good assessments.

Our open-access task versions give very similar results to our original tasks.

We are analysing our data to look at children's profiles across our 6 cognitive tasks. We want to know if there are clusters of children who do well on some skills (for example, working memory and processing speed) and have trouble with other skills (like sustained attention). It's also possible that the cognitive skills we are looking at all group together, meaning that children who have trouble with one of these skills tend to have trouble with all of them.

We need to finish recruiting children so that we have enough participants in all of our groups (English-only, Spanish-English, and Vietnamese-English) to support strong conclusions.

We need to see if our tasks can help determine which children have DLD.

We are starting to investigate how professionals outside research settings could implement these tasks.