Interactive features and language trajectories (Sylvestre et al., 2026)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<b>Purpose: </b>This study examines the critical role of interactive and linguistic features of the family environment in the language and speech developmental trajectories of children with a history of neglect. The proposed hypothesis is that the quality of interactive features will be the primary determinant of whether children follow a normative (control-like) or low developmental trajectory.<b>Method: </b>Data were collected from the Early Longitudinal Language and Neglect study conducted in Quebec (Canada), involving 41 children who had experienced neglect, living in either biological or foster families. Children’s language and speech development was assessed through measures of expressive and receptive vocabulary, mean length of utterance, and percentage of words correct at six time points between 36 and 66 months of age. The child’s language and speech development was classified into one of two categories: normative or low. Parent–child interactive and linguistic features were analyzed using 15-min video recordings of semistructured play sessions conducted at home.<b>Results: </b>Low levels of parental interactive features—such as sensitivity, reactivity, and reciprocity—were positively associated with lower language and speech trajectories in children. Among linguistic features, only the parental mean length of utterance showed a significant link to low trajectories. These patterns were observed consistently in both biological and foster families.<b>Conclusions: </b>The findings demonstrate that interactive features play a critical role in shaping the language and speech trajectories of children experiencing neglect, even more so than linguistic features. This study highlights the importance of high-quality interactions with parents in mitigating the negative effects of neglect on language and speech development. A targeted and adaptive approach, emphasizing parental strengths, has the potential to significantly improve developmental outcomes for children growing up in contexts of adversity.<b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Sociodemographic questionnaire.<b>Supplemental Material S2.</b> COPI — Coding Observations of Parental Behaviors in the Context of Parent-Child Interactions.Sylvestre, A., Di Sante, M., Julien, C., Mérette, C., & Bouchard, C. (2026). The critical role of interactive features in the language and speech developmental trajectories of children experiencing neglect: Results of the early longitudinal language and neglect study. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, </i><i>69</i>(1), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00884
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.533 | 0.020 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".