
Daniela K O'NeillUniversity of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Psychology
Daniela K O'Neill
PhD
About
42
Publications
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Introduction
My expertise is in the development of language and social cognition in early childhood with a particular focus on children's early social pragmatic communication. I developed the Language Use Inventory (LUI), a standardized parent-report measure to assess pragmatic language development in 18-47 month old children used worldwide. I also conduct playful learning outreach around board games, the redesign of urban spaces like parks, and museum exhibits. More info: https://linktr.ee/Daniela_ONeill
Education
September 1989 - June 1993
September 1984 - June 1989
Publications
Publications (42)
Our aims were (a) to examine the growth trajectories of toddlers' social pragmatic communication using a standardized parent-report measure, the Language Use Inventory, and (b) to help distinguish typical variation and the potential for positive outcomes despite low initial functioning from trajectories that are suggestive of persistent language di...
Purpose
The aims of this study were (a) to evaluate the convergent validity of the Language Use Inventory (LUI) with measures of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms, language, and social skills and (b) to assess discriminant validity of the LUI with measures of nonlanguage skills, including daily living skills and motor development.
Method
Thi...
The Language Use Inventory (LUI) is a parent-report measure of the pragmatic functions of young children’s language, standardized and norm-referenced in English (Canada) for children aged 18–47 months. The unique focus of the LUI, along with its appeal to parents, reliability and validity, and usefulness in both research and clinical contexts has p...
The authors conduct a broad, cross-cultural review of the literature in fields such as psychology, education, speech-language pathology, early intervention, and library science concerned with board games and learning in young children. They include experimenter-developed and commercial boardgames and children’s learning in mathematics, science, and...
Background
Pragmatics has generally been defined as the ability to use language in social situations, it is commonly regarded as the third major component of language ability. To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Chinese-speaking children.
Aims
To describe the translation of the Language Use Inventory (LUI) from E...
Purpose
Pragmatics is receiving much attention in both the fields of developmental and clinical psychology; however, there is a dearth of instruments to assess pragmatic abilities specifically among young toddler-age children. The aim of the current study was to test the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Language Use Inventory (...
Purpose
To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children 18–...
When a parent is playing with a toy with his or her child, might a toy's "busy" visual design negatively impact the specificity and quality of the parent's talk? In this study, 24 mother-toddler (M = 23.5 months) dyads played with both (a) unmodified visually busy commercial toys and (b) modified visually "simple" versions of these commercial toys....
Considering the relevance of pragmatics in communication and the lack of assessment tools in Portugal to assess these abilities in early ages, one of the primary goals of this study relies on the translation, adaptation, validation and standardization of the inventory “Language Use Inventory” (LUI), to European Portuguese. LUI is a standardized par...
A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7-8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that...
The study was designed to investigate pragmatic development and the ability to make comments/questions on social and non-social topics in Italian-speaking children aged 18–47 months. Parents of 190 children completed an adaptation of the Language Use Inventory into Italian. Overall, the children’s performance on the subscales of the LUI-Italian inv...
In the present article, we describe the translation of the Language Use Inventory (LUI) (O’Neill, 2009) from English to French and report findings on the French version’s internal reliability and developmental sensitivity: critical steps prior to norming. The LUI is a parent report that can be used to assess how young children (18-47 months) use la...
Parents and children encounter a variety of animals and objects in the early picture books they share, but little is known about how the context in which these entities are presented influences talk about them. The present study investigated how the presence or absence of a visual narrative context influences mothers' tendency to refer to animals a...
Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the...
This study investigated the influence of book genre (narrative or didactic) on mothers’ language use during a book sharing interaction with their 18- to 25-month-olds. Mother–child dyads were videotaped sharing both a narrative and a didactic book, adapted from two commercially available books, and matched in terms of length, quantity of text, and...
Purpose
To examine the predictive validity of the Language Use Inventory (LUI), a parent report of language use by children 18–47 months old (O’Neill, 2009).
Method
348 children whose parents had completed the LUI were reassessed at 5–6 years old with standardized, norm-referenced language measures and parent report of developmental history. The r...
In the absence of scaffolding provided by adults or a play situation, what topics will preschoolers raise in attempting to begin conversations with each other? This study provides a first in-depth examination of preschoolers’ peer-to-peer conversational initiations. The snack-time conversations of a class of 25 preschool children were videotaped bi...
The User Manual with norms to accompany the Language Use Inventory (LUI).
Ch. 5 (Development of the LUI and Psychometric Properties) and Ch. 6 (Standardization and Norms Development) are openly avallable at https://languageuseinventory.com/Research/Psychometrics.
Researchers interested in seeing the full LUI Questionnaire and the LUI Manual can...
In comprehending stories, adults create mental models from which they follow the actions of the characters from the characters' different mental vantage points. Using a novel methodology, this study is the first to examine when children attain the narrative ability to track the mental perspective of characters. That is, when do children follow the...
Purpose
To demonstrate the internal reliability and discriminative validity of the Language Use Inventory for Young Children (LUI; D. K. O’Neill, 2002), a newly developed parent-report measure designed to assess pragmatic language development in 18–47-month-olds.
Method
To examine internal reliability, the LUI was completed by mail by 177 parents...
In this paper, we discuss the construct of episodic future thinking. We have previously defined episodic future thinking as the ability to project oneself into the future to pre-experience an event (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). We distinguish this type of thinking about the future from that which is largely based on a script of how an event routinely u...
The focus of this chapter is the pragmatic ability to provide a listener with information that is new rather than information that is already known by the listener and that would be old (or, as it is usually referred to by linguists, given) and presumably of little interest. The distinction between new and given information has been a recurring the...
This study examined 3-year-olds' explanations for actions of theirs that were premised on a false belief. In Experiment 1, children stated what they thought was inside a crayon box. After stating "crayons," they went to retrieve some paper to draw on. Children were then shown that the box contained candles and were asked to (a) state their initial...
In this study, different measures derived from 41 3- to 4-year-old children’s selfgenerated picture-book narratives and their performance on a general measure of language development (TELD-2, Hresko, Reid & Hammill, 1991) were evaluated with respect to their possible predictive relation two years later with 5 areas of academic achievement (General...
This study examined 3-year-olds' explanations for actions of theirs that were premised on a false belief. In Experiment 1, children stated what they thought was inside a crayon box. After stating "crayons," they went to retrieve some paper to draw on. Children were then shown that the box contained candles and were asked to (a) state their initial...
Two experiments compared the role of tactile and deictic gestures in children's acquisition of adjectives. Children were taught novel adjective terms (e.g., spongy) pertaining to a target toy, accompanied for 1 group of children by a relevant descriptive gesture (e.g., squeezing) and by a point gesture for another group. Children then chose a toy f...
The ability of 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 48) ability to (re)introduce main characters when narrating a picture-book was assessed, taking into account not only their use of nominal forms, but also their use of deictic point gestures and character speech. Using these paralinguistic means, 3-year-olds clarified a significantly larger proportion (43%) of...
Thinking about the future is an integral component of human cognition - one that has been claimed to distinguish us from other species. Building on the construct of episodic memory, we introduce the concept of 'episodic future thinking': a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event. We argue that episodic future thinking has...
Two studies explored 3- and 4-year-olds' (N= 60) understanding that the five senses can each lead to different types of knowledge. In Study 1, 40 children engaged in five scenarios in which they could only perform one sensory action to identify the property of an object (e.g., color, scent). After performing the action, children were asked how they...
In three studies, two-year-old children communicated to a parent which of two out-of-reach objects contained a sticker. Across trials, the objects were positioned in different configurations so that it was possible or impossible for a child's pointing gesture to unambiguously specify one object. In Study 1, the objects used were two boxes distingui...
Twenty 22-month-old typically developing children (TD), 11 children with Down syndrome (DS) and 10 children with autism (A), all functioning at a one- or two-word linguistic level, were given eight series of four toys to explore. In each series, the first three toys (i.e. Trials 1–3) were identical, but the fourth toy (i.e. Trial 4) differed on a p...
Little is known about the emergence of modal adjuncts to mark uncertainty. We used the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow 1985, 1990) to examine the use of the modal terms maybe, possibly, probably and might among 10 children between ages 2;0 and 4;11. A coding scheme was developed to permit a detailed examination of the contexts in which these te...
These studies examined whether toddlers take their communicative partners' knowledge states into account when communicating with them. In Study 1, 16 2-year-old children (mean age 2-7) had to ask a parent for help in retrieving a toy. On each trial, a child was first introduced to a new toy that was then placed in 1 of 2 containers on a high shelf....
University Microfilms order no. 9414629. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references.
3 studies investigated whether young children understand that the acquisition of certain types of knowledge depends on the modality of the sensory experience involved. 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were exposed to pairs of objects that either looked the same but felt different, or that felt the same but looked different. In Study 1, 36 children w...
Young children's ability to understand which experiences led to a belief was investigated in 3 studies. Three-, 4-, and 5-yr-olds learned about the contents of a toy "tunnel" in three different ways: They saw the contents, were told about them, or felt them. Immediately after each trial, children were asked to state what was in the tunnel and also...