Mark Reiser’s research while affiliated with Arizona State University and other places

Purpose: Young children with developmental speech and/or language impairment (DSLI) often fail to develop important oral language and early literacy skills that are foundational for subsequent schooling and reading success. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of the TELL curriculum and associated evidence-based teaching practices in promoting the acquisition of oral language and early literacy skills for preschool children with DSLI. Participants: Participants included 202 male and 87 female preschoolers with DSLI in the absence of other developmental impairment. Children ranged in age from 43 to 63 months. They were enrolled in 91 inclusive preschool classes and their corresponding classroom teachers were all female. Method: In this cluster RCT, classroom teachers were randomly assigned to implement the TELL curriculum or to continue with their business-as-usual (BAU) curriculum. Proximal outcomes were assessed with investigator-developed curriculum-based measures (CBM) administered six times over the school year and an investigator-developed assessment of vocabulary targeted in TELL. Standardized tests of oral language (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool - 2nd Edition), and early literacy skills (Test of Preschool Early Literacy), and a benchmarked early literacy assessment (Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screening PreK) were administered at the beginning and end of the school year to determine impact on more distal outcomes. Results: Results indicated a significant TELL effect for all CBMs at later measurement points with Cohen’s ds in the medium (.43) to very large (1.25) range. TELL effects were also noted for the vocabulary measures with small to medium between-group effect sizes (Cohen’s f^2 range from .02 to .44). There was also a significant TELL effect for the distal vocabulary measure, but no significant TELL effects for the standardized distal measures. Conclusion: Based on progress measures, the TELL curriculum was effective for improving the oral language and early literacy skills of young children with DSLI.

Longitudinal investigations, where subjects are followed over time, have played an increasingly prominent role in medicine, health, and psychology in the last decades. This chapter will address inference for a two-level mixed model for a longitudinal study where observational units are clustered at both levels. Bootstrap confidence intervals for model parameters are investigated under the issues of non-normality and limited sample size of the original data. A one stage case-resampling bootstrap will be established for constructing confidence intervals by sampling clusters with replacement at the higher level. A two-stage case-resampling bootstrap will be developed by sampling clusters with replacement at the higher level and then sampling with replacement at the lower level also. Monte-Carlo simulations will be utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of these bootstrap methods with various size clusters for the mixed-effects model in terms of bias, standard deviation and confidence interval coverage for the fixed effects as well as for variance components of the random effects . The results show that the parametric bootstrap and cluster bootstrap at the higher level perform better than the two-stage bootstrap . The bootstrap methods will be applied to a longitudinal study of preschool children nested within classrooms.

Many longitudinal studies, especially in clinical trials, suffer from missing data issues. Most estimation procedures assume that the missing values are ignorable. However, this assumption leads to unrealistic simplification and is implausible for many cases. When non-ignorable missingness is preferred, classical pattern-mixture models with the data stratified according to a variety of missing patterns and a model specified for each stratum are widely used for longitudinal data analysis. But this assumption usually results in under-identifiability because of the need to estimate many stratum-specific parameters. Further, pattern mixture models have the drawback that a large sample is usually required. In this paper, a continuous latent factor model is proposed and this novel approach overcomes limitations which exist in pattern mixture models by specifying a continuous latent factor. The advantages of this model, including small sample feasibility, are demonstrated by comparing with Roy’s pattern mixture model using an application to a clinical study of AIDS patients with advanced immune suppression.

We used sex, observed parenting quality at 18 months, and three variants of the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene (Val158Met [rs4680], intron1 [rs737865], and 3'-untranslated region [rs165599]) to predict mothers' reports of inhibitory and attentional control (assessed at 42, 54, 72, and 84 months) and internalizing symptoms (assessed at 24, 30, 42, 48, and 54 months) in a sample of 146 children (79 male). Although the pattern for all three variants was very similar, Val158Met explained more variance in both outcomes than did intron1, the 3'-untranslated region, or a haplotype that combined all three catechol-O-methyltransferase variants. In separate models, there were significant three-way interactions among each of the variants, parenting, and sex, predicting the intercepts of inhibitory control and internalizing symptoms. Results suggested that Val158Met indexes plasticity, although this effect was moderated by sex. Parenting was positively associated with inhibitory control for methionine-methionine boys and for valine-valine/valine-methionine girls, and was negatively associated with internalizing symptoms for methionine-methionine boys. Using the "regions of significance" technique, genetic differences in inhibitory control were found for children exposed to high-quality parenting, whereas genetic differences in internalizing were found for children exposed to low-quality parenting. These findings provide evidence in support of testing for differential susceptibility across multiple outcomes.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether dispositional sadness predicted children's prosocial behavior and if sympathy mediated this relation. Constructs were measured when children (n = 256 at time 1) were 18, 30, and 42 months old. Mothers and non-parental caregivers rated children's sadness; mothers, caregivers, and fathers rated children's prosocial behavior; sympathy (concern and hypothesis testing) and prosocial behavior (indirect and direct, as well as verbal at older ages) were assessed with a task in which the experimenter feigned injury. In a panel path analysis, 30-month dispositional sadness predicted marginally higher 42-month sympathy; in addition, 30-month sympathy predicted 42-month sadness. Moreover, when controlling for prior levels of prosocial behavior, 30-month sympathy significantly predicted reported and observed prosocial behavior at 42 months. Sympathy did not mediate the relation between sadness and prosocial behavior (either reported or observed).

The primary goal of this study was to examine whether effortful control (EC; effortful regulation), reactive undercontrol (IMP; e.g., impulsivity, speed of approach), and reactive overcontrol (NOV; inhibition to novelty) were 3 distinct constructs at 30 months (Time 1; n = 216), 42 months (Time 2; n = 192), and 54 months (Time 3; n = 168) of age. Parents', nonparental caregivers', and/or observers' ratings were obtained for all 3 constructs at all 3 times, as were multiple behavioral indices of each construct. Several alternative factor structures were tested, including 1-, 2-, and 3-factor models. The best fitting and most parsimonious model was one with 3 separate latent constructs at 42 and 54 months and 2 distinct constructs, EC and impulsivity/low inhibition to novelty combined, at 30 months. EC, IMP, and NOV also demonstrated some interindividual consistency across time, especially EC and IMP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Purpose In this study, the authors used cued shadowing to examine children’s phonological word-form representations by studying the effects of onset and rhyme primes on lexical access. Method Twenty-five preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI; hereafter known as the SLI group), 24 age- and gender-matched children (AM group), and 20 vocabulary- and gender-matched children (VM group) participated. Children listened to pairs of words and repeated the second word as quickly as they could. Primes included words with overlapping onsets, words with overlapping rimes, and identical or unrelated words. Results As expected, unrelated words inhibited production in the AM and VM groups. Overlapping rimes primed production in the AM group. No inhibitory or priming effects were found for the SLI group. Conclusion Phonological priming may be used to study the phonological representations of preschool-age children. Results suggest that none of the groups accessed words incrementally. Priming for overlapping rimes by the AM but not the VM or SLI groups may indicate that the AM group benefited from lexical organization favoring nucleus + rime organization that has not yet developed for the VM or SLI groups. The lack of inhibition in the SLI group suggests that their phonological representations were not detailed enough to prime words in their lexicon or that they did not process the prime or target words.

Data regarding children's shyness and emotionality were collected at three time points, two years apart (T1: N = 214, M = 6.12 years; T2: N = 185, M = 7.67 years; T3: N = 185, M = 9.70 years), and internalizing data were collected at T1 and T3. Relations among parent-rated shyness, emotionality (parent- and teacher-rated anger, sadness, and positive emotional intensity [EI]), and mother-rated internalizing were examined in panel models. In some cases, shyness predicted emotionality two years later (teacher-rated anger, parent-rated sadness, teacher-rated positive EI) and emotionality sometimes predicted shyness two years later (teacher-rated sadness, parent-rated positive EI, teacher-rated positive EI). Parent-rated shyness and/or emotionality (parent-rated anger and parent-rated sadness) predicted internalizing at T3. Results shed light on developmental relations between emotionality and shyness, as well as processes of risk for, or protection against, the development of internalizing problems.

In a sample (n = 235) of 30-, 42-, and 54-month-olds, the relations among parenting, effortful control (EC), impulsivity, and children's committed compliance were examined. Parenting was assessed with mothers' observed sensitivity and warmth; EC was measured by mothers' and caregivers' reports, as well as a behavioral task; impulsivity was assessed by mothers' and caregivers' reports; and committed compliance was observed during a cleanup and prohibition task, as well as measured by adults' reports. Using path modeling, there was evidence that 30-month parenting predicted high EC and low impulsivity a year later when the stability of the outcomes was controlled, and there was evidence that 30- and 42-month EC, but not impulsivity, predicted higher committed compliance a year later, controlling for earlier levels of the outcomes. Moreover, 42-month EC predicted low impulsivity a year later. Fixed effects models, which are not biased by omitted time-invariant variables, also were conducted and showed that 30-month parenting still predicted EC a year later, and 42-month EC predicted later low impulsivity. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of differentiating between effortful control and impulsivity and the potential mediating role of EC in the relations between parenting and children's committed compliance.