Browsing by Subject "taustatekijät"

Aims. There is an increasing number of multilingual children in the workloads of Finnish speech language pathologists. Yet there is little research on the typical and untypical language development of multilingual children. PAULA small group intervention has been developed to support the language development of multilingual children in a daycare setting. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the small group language intervention affects the Finnish language development of multilingual children and how background factors, such as the exposure to the Finnish language, affect the development of the study and control groups. Method. Subjects included 60 typically developing multilingual children, 34 in the study group and 26 in the control group. Subjects were 4 years old at the beginning of the study and the assessment was repeated 3 times within a year. Finnish language was measured with a vocabulary score calculated from Fonologiatesti (Kunnari, Savinainen-Makkonen & Saaristo-Helin 2012) and with a form filled out by the daycare staff. The data was analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 26. The difference between the study and control groups was analyzed with repeated measures ANOVA, Friedman test, and Mann–Whitney U test. The effect of background factors on the vocabulary scores was analyzed with linear regression, and the effect of background factors on the assessment by the daycare staff was analyzed with Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Kruskal–Wallis test. In addition, the background factors affecting the vocabulary score at the start of the study were analyzed with linear regression. Results and conclusion. The vocabulary scores of the intervention group improved more during the intervention compared to the control group, but the effect wasn’t observed in the follow-up measurement. PAULA small group intervention can support the lexical development of multilingual children, but more research is needed to confirm the findings. Being in the study group was positively associated with the change in vocabulary scores while the months spent in a Finnish language daycare were negatively associated. The months spent in daycare and the exposure to Finnish were positively associated with the vocabulary score at the beginning of the study. The children who at the beginning of the study had spent longer in daycare and had more exposure to Finnish are likely to have bigger vocabularies at the start and therefore improve less during the intervention. The children who had the least exposure to Finnish improved the most during the intervention. There was no statistically significant difference between the groups in the daycare assessments. In the study group exposure to Finnish was positively associated with the change in the daycare assessments. In the control group, no background factors had a significant connection to the daycare assessments.