Relationships between concurrent language ability and mental health outcomes in a South African sample of 13-year-olds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children and adolescents with delayed or disordered language development are at increased risk of a number of negative outcomes, including social and emotional problems and mental health difficulties. Yet, in low- and middle- income countries, where risk factors for compromised language development are known to be prevalent, there is a lack of research on the association between child and adolescent language ability and mental health outcomes. This study evaluates data from a cross-sectional study in Khayelitsha, a semi-urban impoverished community near Cape Town, South Africa. To measure language ability, behaviour and mental health, adolescents aged 13 (n = 200) were assessed using the Riddles subtest of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children Version 2, the parent report Child Behaviour Checklist, and the self-report Moods and Feelings Questionnaire and the Self-Esteem Questionnaire. We conducted univariate and multivariate analyses to determine associations between language skills, self-esteem and mental health in this group of adolescents. Poor language ability was related to a range of concurrent adverse difficulties, such as attention deficits, self-esteem problems, social withdrawal, and depressive symptoms. Increased levels of language ability were related to better psychosocial profiles. In some cases, only individuals with a low level of language (bottom 10% of sample) were at increased risk of maladaptive outcomes. This study replicates the well-established relationship between language ability and poorer mental health found within high income countries in an upper middle-income country setting. Locally accessible support for children with reduced language ability is required, given the longer-term consequences of poorer mental health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".