Parental Report via a Mobile App in the Context of Early Language Trajectories: StarWords Study Protocol

Mieszkowska, Karolina; Krajewski, Grzegorz; Sobota, Krzysztof; Dynak, Agnieszka; Kolak, Joanna; Krysztofiak, Magdalena; Łukomska, Barbara; Łuniewska, Magdalena; Garmann, Nina Gram; Hansen, Pernille; Romøren, Anna Sara Hexeberg; Simonsen, Hanne Gram; Alcock, Katie; Katsos, Napoleon; Haman, Ewa

Abstract

Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0–3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children’s language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children’s performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project’s novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 3, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Mar 5, 2022
• Publication Date: Mar 5, 2022
• Deposit Date: Mar 7, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 7, 2022
• Journal: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
• Electronic ISSN: 1660-4601
• Publisher: MDPI
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 3067
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19053067
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19053067
• Related Public URLs: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
• Additional Information: Additional Information : ** From MDPI via Jisc Publications Router ** Licence for this article: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ **Journal IDs: eissn 1660-4601 **History: published 05-03-2022; accepted 03-03-2022; Access Information : This article belongs to the Special Issue The First 1000 Days of Life: Investigating Early Markers for Promoting Healthy Language Development (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph/special_issues/_promoting_healthy_language_development); Funders : National Science Center;Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (subsidy for the maintenance and development of research potential); Grant Number: 2018/31/B/HS6/03916; Grant Number: 501-D125-01-1250000