Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T08:14:16.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Language skills in shy and non-shy preschoolers and the effects of assessment context*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2008

KATHERINE A. SPERE ,
MARY ANN EVANS ,
CAROL-ANNE HENDRY  and
JUBILEA MANSELL
KATHERINE A. SPERE
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
MARY ANN EVANS*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
CAROL-ANNE HENDRY
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
JUBILEA MANSELL
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
*
Address for correspondence: Mary Ann Evans, Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, CANADA. tel: 519-824-4120, x 53080; fax: 519-837-8629; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy children spoke less than non-shy and middle children at home. Additionally, the parents of shy children spoke less than parents of non-shy children. Although there were no language differences between the groups, results showed a context effect for expressive vocabulary, in that all groups of children scored higher at school. The pattern of results suggests that previously observed language differences found between shy and non-shy children are not robust, and that testing children at school does not negatively impact their performance.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 53 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship (NSERC – PGS – A) awarded to the first author, and a research grant from the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network awarded to the second author. We would like to thank the parents and children who participated in this study, as well as the schools, teachers and principals who expressed interest in our study and allowed us to collect data in the schools. We also would like to thank Tiffany Pursoo for her help with entering, transcribing and coding the data and Rod Barron for his comments on an early draft.

References

REFERENCES

Asendorpf, J. B. (1990). Beyond social withdrawal: Shyness, unsociability, and peer avoidance. Human Development 33, 250–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asendorpf, J. B. & Meier, G. H. (1993). Personality effects on children's speech in everyday life: Sociability-mediated exposure and shyness-mediated reactivity to social situations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, 1072–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beidel, D. C. & Turner, S. M. (1999). The natural course of shyness and related syndromes. In Schmidt, L. A. & Schulkin, J. (eds) Extreme fear, shyness, and social phobia: Origins, biological mechanisms, and clinical outcomes, 203–223. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broberg, A., Wessels, H., Lamb, M. & Hwang, C. (1997). Effects of day care on the development of cognitive abilities in 8-year-olds: A longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology 33, 62–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Buss, A. H. & Plomin, R. A. (1984). Temperament: Early Developing Personality Traits. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bzydra, R., Evans, M. A. & Spooner, A. (2002). The relationship between shyness and self-determination in middle childhood. Poster presented at the Biannual Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Ottawa, August, 2002.Google Scholar
Caspi, A., Elder, G. H. & Bem, D. F. (1988). Moving away from the world: Life-course patterns of shy children. Developmental Psychology 24, 824–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coplan, R. J. & Armer, M. (2005). Talking yourself out of being shy: Shyness, expressive vocabulary, and socio-emotional adjustment in preschool. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 51, 20–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crozier, W. R. (1997). Individual learners: Personality differences in education. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crozier, R. & Hostettler, K. (2003). The influence of shyness on children's test performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology 73, 317–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crozier, R. & Perkins, P. (2002). Shyness as a factor when assessing children. Educational Psychology in Practice 18, 239–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daniels, D. & Plomin, R. (1985). Origins of individual differences in infant shyness. Developmental Psychology 21, 118–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, M. A. (1987). Discourse characteristics of reticent children. Applied Psycholinguistics 8, 171–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, M. A. (1993). Communicative competence as a dimension of shyness. In Rubin, K. & Asendorpf, J. (eds) Social withdrawal, inhibition and shyness in childhood, 189–212. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Evans, M. A. (1996). Reticent primary grade children and their more talkative peers: Verbal, nonverbal, and self-concept characteristics. Journal of Educational Psychology 88, 739–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, M. A. & Bienert, H. (1992). Control and paradox in teacher conversations with shy children. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 24, 502–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gertner, B. L., Rice, M. L. & Hadley, P. A. (1994). Influence of communicative competence on peer preferences in a preschool classroom. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37, 913–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirshfeld, D. R., Rosenbaum, J. F., Biederman, J., Bolduc, E. A., Faraone, S. V., Snidman, N., Reznick, J. S. & Kagan, J. (1992). Stable behavioral inhibition and its association with anxiety disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 31, 103–111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kagan, J. (1999). The concept of behavioral inhibition. In Schmidt, L. A. & Schulkin, J. (eds) Extreme fear, shyness, and social phobia: Origins, biological mechanisms, and clinical outcomes, 3–13. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kagan, J., Reznick, J. S. & Snidman, N. (1988). Biological bases of childhood shyness. Science 240, 167–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahane, L. H. (2001). Regression Basics. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Levin, I. P. & Hart, S. S. (2003). Risk preferences in young children: Early evidence of individual differences in reaction to potential gains and losses. Journal of Behavioral Decision Marking 16, 397–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, B. A., Gong, Z., Hessles, S., Evans, M. A. & Jared, D. (2006). Understanding print: Early reading development and the contributions of home literacy experiences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 93, 63–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Newcomer, P. & Hammill, D. (1997). Test of Language Development – Primary – Third Edition. Texas: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
Paul, R. & Kellogg, L. (1997). Temperament in late talkers. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 38, 803–811.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pursoo, T., Evans, M. A. & Shaw, D. (2005). Parental elaboration of novel words during shared book reading. Paper presented at the meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Montreal, Quebec, June 2005.Google Scholar
Rezendes, M., Snidman, N., Kagan, J. & Gibbons, J. (1993). Features of speech in inhibited and uninhibited children. In Rubin, K. & Asendorpf, J. (eds) Social withdrawal, inhibition and shyness in childhood, 177–87. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rubin, K. H. (1982). Social and social-cognitive developmental characteristics of young isolate, normal, and sociable children. In Rubin, K. H. & Ross, H. S. (eds) Peer relationships and social skills in childhood, 353–74. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, K. H. & Asendorpf, J. B. (1993). Social withdrawal, inhibition, and shyness in childhood: Conceptual and definitional issues. In Rubin, K. & Asendorpf, J. (eds) Social withdrawal, inhibition and shyness in childhood, 3–17. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rubin, K. H., Cheah, C. S. L. & Fox, N. A. (2001). Emotion regulation, parenting and display of social reticence in preschoolers. Early Education and Development 12, 97–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, K. H., Stewart, S. L. & Coplan, R. J. (1995). Social withdrawal in childhood: Conceptual and empirical perspectives. In Ollendick, T. & Prinz, R. (eds) Advances in clinical child psychology, Vol. 17, 157–96. New York: Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, L. A. & Fox, N. A. (1999). Conceptual, biological, and behavioral distinctions among different categories of shy children. In Schmidt, L. A. & Schulkin, J. (eds) Extreme fear, shyness, and social phobia: Origins, biological mechanisms, and clinical outcomes, 47–66. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, L. A. & Tasker, S. L. (2000). Childhood shyness: Determinants, development and ‘depathology’. In Crozier, W. R. (ed.) Shyness: Development, consolidation, and change, 30–46. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Spere, K. A., Schmidt, L. A., Theall-Honey, L. A. & Martin-Chang, S. (2004). Expressive and receptive language skills of temperamentally shy preschoolers. Infant and Child Development 13, 123–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Kleeck, A. & Street, R. (1982). Does reticence mean just talking less? Qualitative differences in the language of talkative and reticent preschoolers. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11, 609–628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallace, G. & Hammill, D. (2002). Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test-2. Texas: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
Weschler, D. (2002). Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-III. Toronto: The Psychological Corporation, Harcourt Brace Javanovich.Google Scholar
Wood, H. & Wood, D. (1984). An experimental evaluation of the effects of five styles of teacher conversation on the language of hearing impaired children. Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry 25, 45–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed