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Purpose: This study investigates how the variables of culture and hearing status might influence the amount of parent-child talk families engage in throughout an average day. Method: Seventeen Vietnamese and 8 Canadian families of children with hearing loss and 17 Vietnamese and 13 Canadian families with typically hearing children between the ages of 18 and 48 months old participated in this cross-comparison design study. Each child wore a Language ENvironment Analysis system digital language processor for 3 days. An automated vocal analysis then calculated an average conversational turn count (CTC) for each participant as the variable of investigation. The CTCs for the 4 groups were compared using a Kruskal-Wallis test and a set of planned pairwise comparisons. Results: The Canadian families participated in significantly more conversational turns than the Vietnamese families. No significant difference was found between the Vietnamese or the Canadian cohorts as a function of hearing status. Conclusions: Culture, but not hearing status, influences CTCs as derived by the Language ENvironment Analysis system. Clinicians should consider how cultural communication practices might influence their suggestions for language stimulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some children who encounter unexpected reading difficulties in the fourth grade. This phenomenon has been described as late emerging reading disabilities (LERD). Using Grade 4 as a starting point, this study examined the reading development of 964 children between kindergarten and Grade 7. The results showed that 72.0% of children had typical reading performance in Grade 4, whereas there was 0.7% with poor word reading, 12.6% with poor reading comprehension, 2.5% with poor word reading and comprehension, and 12.2% with borderline performance. We also showed that there were similar proportions of children who had early versus late emerging reading difficulties; however, most of the late emerging poor readers recovered by Grade 7. Furthermore, our study showed that poor comprehenders showed poorer performance than typical readers on word reading, pseudoword decoding, and spelling between Grade 1 and Grade 7 and poorer performance on a working memory task in kindergarten. Overall, this study showed that most children recover from late emerging reading problems and that working memory may be an early indicator for reading comprehension difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]