Grundbok i Logopedi är en omfattande introduktion till ämnet. De fem olika delarna består av 41 kapitel skrivna av 57 författare. Del I introducerar läsaren till logopedin som profession och ämne. Del II beskriver utvecklingsrelaterade språk- och talstörningar och därefter följer del III som handlar om förvärvade språk- och talstörningar. Del IV handlar om röststörningar och del V om ät- och sväljstörningar. 

Varje del börjar med ett kapitel som ger en teoretisk översikt och avslutas med två kapitel om bedömning respektive intervention. Boken är avsedd för studerande vid logopediutbildningarna och är samtidigt en både bred och djup källa till information och fortbildning om logopedi för yrkesutövare inom logopedi och andra professioner. 

Narrative ability is an important life-skill and mature narrators do not only provide information about actions and events when telling a story but also include the motivations, emotions and beliefs experienced by protagonists. It is rare for young children to spontaneously explain the beliefs of story characters but the reasons are unclear. In the current study, frog story data from 143 Swedish children aged 4–6 showed that children’s level of explicitness in conveying a fictional false belief was associated with referential narrative ability and use of mental vocabulary, but not to the ability to formulate embedded propositions. Socioeconomic status predicted level of explicitness, whereas no associations were found to age, sex or being multilingual. Future work should examine narrative practices in preschool and in the home more closely, enabling improved support to provide children with equal opportunities.

Liberalernas förslag om obligatorisk språkbedömning av tvååringar som inte är inskrivna i förskolan saknar vetenskapligt stöd. I stället behövs fler utbildade förskollärare i utsatta områden och mer samarbete mellan föräldrar och samhällets instanser, skriver sju forskare.

The main goals of this dissertation are to investigate the associations between language and executive functions, including selective auditory attention, in Swedish children aged 4–6, to examine possible links to factors relating to the child and his/her social environment, and to evaluate preschool interventions with regard to potential improvements in language and/or executive functions. Measures were obtained by combining results from behavioral tests, language samples in the form of narratives, parent and teacher ratings and a measure of selective auditory attention as brain activity. Additionally, previous work regarding the nature and direction of the association between language and executive functions is reviewed and discussed. Progress during preschool years in language and executive functioning development seem to go hand in hand, and a body of work has indicated that language and executive functions are closely associated, although directions of potential casual relationships are still unclear. For Swedish, preschool-aged children, little is known of the language–executive functions relationship and the extent to which these skills can be improved via pedagogical working methods or interventions. The first paper investigates the language–executive functions relationship and potential associations to background factors, and the second paper examines the same research questions in larger sample, adding a selective auditory attention measure. The third paper constitutes one of the first randomized controlled trials in the Swedish preschool context and investigates effects of two contrasting pedagogical interventions compared to business-as-usual. The fourth paper explores links between children’s spontaneous explanations of a fictional misunderstanding, their language skills and their executive functions. In line with previous work from other contexts, results confirm an association between children’s grammar skills and inhibition, including selective auditory attention. Children’s socioeconomic background is significantly related to language skills, executive functions and selective attention. The current results also suggest a female advantage for receptive vocabulary and morphosyntax and indicate that bi- and multilingual children perform lower than monolingual peers with regard to receptive vocabulary in the majority language, also when controlling for socioeconomic status. The preschool interventions did not lead to any gains in language, executive functions or selective attention compared to the control group. Further work is clearly needed to provide a solid evidence-base for Swedish preschool practices. Future studies should focus on identifying relevant mechanisms in order to enable early intervention targeting children at risk for lagging behind their peers already in preschool. Previous empirical work as well as theoretical suggestions regarding the nature and direction of the links between language and executive functions are divergent, which is related to a lack of consensus with regard to underlying theories and to problems with definitions and assessment. In this thesis, it is suggested that the association is intertwined and reciprocal, congruent with a view on development as dynamic and complex and in line with a theory of mutualism. Future work is needed to refine theories and to formulate testable hypotheses regarding the language–executive functions relationship.

Language skills and executive functions (EF) undergo rapid development during preschool years and are foundational for a wide range of life outcomes but little is known of the connections between language and EF in Swedish, typically developing children. The current pilot study included 47 mono- and multilingual children aged 4–6 and aimed at describing the relationship between language and EF and investigating potential associations to age, sex, bi-/multilingualism, socioeconomic status (SES), and aspects of preschool attendance. Measures of language and EF correlated with one another to a large extent, but also showed some differentiation, suggesting a specific link between morphosyntactic ability and inhibition. Age was a significant predictor of most but not all measures. No significant effects of sex were found, with the exception for a female advantage in nonverbal communicative behavior, assessed by a novel rating paradigm. SES did not predict language or EF, and bi- and/or multilingual children did not differ from monolingual Swedish children on language or EF measures. Findings are discussed in relation to the connection between language and EF as well as to the needs of development of reliable language, EF, and communication measures for use in the Swedish context.

Associations between language and executive functions (EFs) are well-established but previous work has often focused more on EFs than on language. To further clarify the language–EF relationship, we assessed several aspects of language and EFs in 431 Swedish children aged 4–6, including selective auditory attention which was measured in an event-related potential paradigm. We also investigated potential associations to age, socioeconomic status (SES), bi-/multilingualism, sex and aspects of preschool attendance and quality. Language and EFs correlated weakly to moderately, indicating that relying on measures of vocabulary alone may overestimate the strength of the language–EF relationship. Contrary to predictions, we found no correlations between selective attention and EFs. There were however correlations between morphosyntactic accuracy and selective auditory attention which is in line with previous work and suggests a specific link between morphosyntax and the ability to suppress irrelevant stimuli. In Sweden, socioeconomic differences are rather small and preschool is universally available, but nevertheless, aspects of parental SES predicted children’s performance on all measures. Bi-/multilingual children performed lower on language also when controlling for SES, highlighting the need for interventions to reduce inequalities in educational outcomes already in preschool. A female advantage was found for both language and EFs, whereas preschool attendance and quality were not significantly related to outcome measures. Future work should include longitudinal studies of language and EF development, include children from diverse SES backgrounds and contribute toward a theoretical framework that further clarifies the language–EF relationship.

Background

During the preschool years, children’s development of skills like language and communication, executive functions, and socioemotional comprehension undergo dramatic development. Still, our knowledge of how these skills are enhanced is limited. The preschool contexts constitute a well-suited arena for investigating these skills and hold the potential for giving children an equal opportunity preparing for the school years to come. The present study compared two pedagogical methods in the Swedish preschool context as to their effect on language and communication, executive functions, socioemotional comprehension, and early math. The study targeted children in the age span four-to-six-year-old, with an additional focus on these children’s backgrounds in terms of socioeconomic status, age, gender, number of languages, time spent at preschool, and preschool start. An additional goal of the study was to add to prior research by aiming at disentangling the relationship between the investigated variables.

Method

The study constitutes a randomized controlled trial including 18 preschools and 29 preschool units, with a total of 431 children, and 98 teachers. The interventions lasted for 6 weeks, preceded by pre-testing and followed by post-testing of the children. Randomization was conducted on the level of preschool unit, to either of the two interventions or to control. The interventions consisted of a socioemotional and material learning paradigm (SEMLA) and a digitally implemented attention and math training paradigm (DIL). The preschools were further evaluated with ECERS-3. The main analysis was a series of univariate mixed regression models, where the nested structure of individuals, preschool units and preschools were modeled using random variables.

Results

The result of the intervention shows that neither of the two intervention paradigms had measurable effects on the targeted skills. However, there were results as to the follow-up questions, such as executive functions predicting all other variables (language and communication, socioemotional comprehension, and math). Background variables were related to each other in patterns congruent with earlier findings, such as socioeconomic status predicting outcome measures across the board. The results are discussed in relation to intervention fidelity, length of intervention, preschool quality, and the impact of background variables on children’s developmental trajectories and life prospects.

Within the field of developmental science, there is a general agreement of the need to work together across academic disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the understandings of how to optimize child development and learning. However, experience also shows that such collaborations may be challenging. This paper reports on the experiences of bidirectional collaboration between researchers in a multidisciplinary research team and between researchers and stakeholders, in the first randomized controlled trial in Swedish preschool. The objective of the trial was to investigate the effects of two pedagogical learning strategies evaluating language, communication, attention, executive functions and early math. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from early childhood education, linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuro science. Educational researchers and theorists within the field of early childhood education in Sweden have during the last two decades mainly undertaken small-scale qualitative praxis-oriented and participative research. There is a widespread skepticism with regards to some of the core principles in controlled intervention methodologies, including a strong resistance towards individual testing of children. Consequently unanticipated disagreements and conflicts arose within the research team, as RCT methodology requires the measurement of effects pre and post the intervention. The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions for bidirectional collaboration both between researchers and stakeholders and between researchers in the research team. The findings illustrate strategies and negotiations that emerged in order to address ontological and epistemological controversies and disagreements. These include (a) the negotiation of research ethics, (b) making divergences visible and learning from each other, (c) using a multi-epistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers.

Background and aim: it has been suggested that story retell will lead to more informative or syntactically more complex stories, since an exact verbal model is given. However, story generation might better reflect genuine storytelling skills, such as narrative organization (e.g. Kunnari et al., 2016). Previous results regarding differences between girls and boys are inconclusive. The aim of the current study is to compare story retell and story generation in a large sample of Swedish preschoolers.

 Materials and methods: data were collected within the framework of an intervention study (Gerholm et al., 2018) and included 431 children (mean age 5;3, range 3;10 – 6;4), of which 24 % were bi- or multilingual and 6.7 % had a language disorder. The Renfrew Bus Story (Renfrew, 1995; Svensson & Tuominen-Eriksson, 2002) was used to elicit story retells and Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 2003), was employed to generate stories. Receptive vocabulary was assessed with PPVT-4 (Dunn & Dunn, 2007). Testing was video and audio recorded and the stories were transcribed in ELAN software. Measures regarding story content, story length, syntactic complexity and morphological accuracy were extracted from the narratives. Scoring of story content was based on the Bus Story manual and on the event structure of Frog, Where Are You?. Story length was defined as number of unified predicates (Berman, 1988). Syntactic complexity was defined as number of subordinate clauses and morphological accuracy as the proportion of morphologically well-formed utterances. The scores regarding story content/information were z-transformed to enable comparisons between the two story conditions.

 Results: in story generation, children told significantly longer stories (M_generation = 28, SD_generation = 15; M_retell = 17, SD_retell = 7, p < .001) and had a larger proportion of morphosyntactically correct utterances (M_generation = 73 % well-formed clauses, SD_generation = 19) compared to story retell (M_retell = 65 % well-formed clauses, SD_retell = 23, p < .001). Syntactic complexity was also significantly higher in the story generation condition, but the difference was possibly due to outliers. In story retell, children included more story content (M_retell = 0.33, SD_retell = 0.18) than in story generation (M_generation = 0.29, SD_generation = 0.15, p < .001). Boys told significantly longer stories than girls in both conditions, no other differences between girls and boys were found. Children with additional other language/s than Swedish spoken in the home did not differ from monolingual Swedish children on any of the language measures. Children with a known language disorder (LD) did not differ from typically-developing (TD) children on any of the language measures. Range of performance was substantial within the TD group. 

Conclusions: in line with previous work, story retell led to more informative stories. However, there was no support for the claim that story retell would lead to more syntactically complex stories compared to story generation. Lack of differences between TD and LD children may indicate the presence of undetected language disorders in the TD group. 

Background

During the preschool years, children develop abilities and skills in areas crucial for later success in life. These abilities include language, executive functions, attention, and socioemotional skills. The pedagogical methods used in preschools hold the potential to enhance these abilities, but our knowledge of which pedagogical practices aid which abilities, and for which children, is limited. The aim of this paper is to describe an intervention study designed to evaluate and compare two pedagogical methodologies in terms of their effect on the above-mentioned skills in Swedish preschool children.

Method

The study is a randomized control trial (RCT) where two pedagogical methodologies were tested to evaluate how they enhanced children’s language, executive functions and attention, socioemotional skills, and early maths skills during an intensive 6-week intervention. Eighteen preschools including 28 units and 432 children were enrolled in a municipality close to Stockholm, Sweden. The children were between 4;0 and 6;0 years old and each preschool unit was randomly assigned to either of the interventions or to the control group. Background information on all children was collected via questionnaires completed by parents and preschools. Pre- and post-intervention testing consisted of a test battery including tests on language, executive functions, selective auditive attention, socioemotional skills and early maths skills. The interventions consisted of 6 weeks of intensive practice of either a socioemotional and material learning paradigm (SEMLA), for which group-based activities and interactional structures were the main focus, or an individual, digitally implemented attention and math training paradigm, which also included a set of self-regulation practices (DIL). All preschools were evaluated with the ECERS-3.

Discussion

If this intervention study shows evidence of a difference between group-based learning paradigms and individual training of specific skills in terms of enhancing children’s abilities in fundamental areas like language, executive functions and attention, socioemotional skills and early math, this will have big impact on the preschool agenda in the future. The potential for different pedagogical methodologies to have different impacts on children of different ages and with different backgrounds invites a wider discussion within the field of how to develop a preschool curriculum suited for all children.