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We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty-seven monolingual children aged 24-30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production.

The relationship between innovation and skill premium is analysed on a panel of 12 countries for a 16-year span (2000–2015). According to a Schumpeterian view, a non-linear relationship between innovation and skill premium is found showing a threshold effect that reverses the relationship for relatively high levels of innovative activity. Moreover, the relationships change from convex to concave when variables representing different types of innovative activity are considered. In fact, with R&D a positive relationship with skill premium reverses once a threshold is exceeded, while the opposite holds for patents, for which the relationship is initially negative and then becomes positive. We argue that this is due to the different degrees of appropriability of the knowledge produced by innovators with these activities. We then show how to exploit these different patterns to provide a truly innovation-based analysis of the patterns of skill premium for the United States, France, Germany and Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. Aims: It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. Methods & Procedures: Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected. Outcomes & Results: Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. "K"-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English. Conclusions & Implications: Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.

Aims and objectives: To identify the factors that influence decisions made by health professionals when assessing the pain of native English speaking and children whose English is an additional language. Background: Pain assessment in children is often poorly executed following acute injury. Whilst a range of pain assessment tools have been developed, little guidance is provided for assessing pain in children with English as an additional language. Design: Factorial survey design. Methods: Twenty minor injuries unit nurses and 20 children's nursing students participated in an electronic survey to make judgements on 12 scenarios describing a child attending a minor injuries unit following an incident, accompanied by a parent. Respondents had to decide the most important form of pain assessment, and whether they would ask a parent or an interpreter to assess the pain of the child. An open‐ended question asked about the difficulties found in making a judgement. Results: Observation of the child's behaviour was the most common pain assessment reported. The visual analogue scale was significantly associated with children with proficient English. Respondents were significantly more likely to involve parents in the assessment if they could speak English well compared to parents with poor English skills. Moreover, nursing students were significantly more likely than registered nurses to call for support from an interpreter. Thematic analysis identified three themes related to difficulties with pain assessment: contrasting approaches, differing perceptions of pain and overcoming challenges. Conclusions: The reduced ability to communicate between child, parent and healthcare professional highlights the need to identify forms of assessment based on individual cases. Relevance to clinical practice: The number of children with English as an additional language has seen a marked rise over the last decade. In situations where communication ability is reduced, assessment of pain should be tailored to meet the needs of the child. This may require timely access to interpreter services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pain-measurement tools are often criticized for not addressing the influence of culture and ethnicity on pain. This study examined how children who speak English as a primary or additional language discuss pain. Two methods were used in six focus group interviews with 34 children aged 4-7 years: (i) use of drawings from the Pediatric Pain Inventory to capture the language used by children to describe pain; and (ii) observation of the children's placing of pain drawings on red/amber/green paper to denote perceived severity of pain. The findings demonstrated that children with English as an additional language used less elaborate language when talking about pain, but tended to talk about the pictures prior to deciding where they should be placed. For these children, there was a positive significant relationship between language, age, and length of stay in the UK. The children's placement of pain drawings varied according to language background, sex, and age. The findings emphasize the need for sufficient time to assess pain adequately in children who do not speak English as a first language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the world's children grow up learning two or more languages. The study of early bilingualism is central to current psycholinguistics, offering insights into issues such as transfer and interference in development. From an applied perspective, it poses a universal challenge to language assessment practices throughout childhood, as typically developing bilingual children usually underperform relative to monolingual norms when assessed in one language only. We measured vocabulary with Communicative Development Inventories for 372 24-month-old toddlers learning British English and one Additional Language out of a diverse set of 13 (Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Welsh). We furthered theoretical understanding of bilingual development by showing, for the first time, that linguistic distance between the child's two languages predicts vocabulary outcome, with phonological overlap related to expressive vocabulary, and word order typology and morphological complexity related to receptive vocabulary, in the Additional Language. Our study also has crucial clinical implications: we have developed the first bilingual norms for expressive and receptive vocabulary for 24-month-olds learning British English and an Additional Language. These norms were derived from factors identified as uniquely predicting CDI vocabulary measures: the relative amount of English versus the Additional Language in child-directed input and parental overheard speech, and infant gender. The resulting UKBTAT tool was able to accurately predict the English vocabulary of an additional group of 58 bilinguals learning an Additional Language outside our target range. This offers a pragmatic method for the assessment of children in the majority language when no tool exists in the Additional Language. Our findings also suggest that the effect of linguistic distance might extend beyond bilinguals' acquisition of early vocabulary to encompass broader cognitive processes, and could constitute a key factor in the study of the debated bilingual advantage., (© 2018 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)