Influence of shyness on language assessments

Abstract

Accurate assessment of speech and communication disorders is complex and vital to an individual's success and clinician's work. One understudied component that could influence client's performance on language assessments is shyness. Due to a variety of different assessment methods, shy clients may perform worse on more interactive tests compared to less stimulating tests. The goal of this study is to examine the influence of shyness on participant's performance on language assessments which vary in sociability.

124 participants, ages 17-to-37 months, were given three different language tasks varying the social interaction required; a looking task, pointing task, and production task. Parents reported their child's shyness level via the ECBQ (Rothbart, 2007). The degree of shyness was compared with participant's accuracy across the three tests. Preliminary results suggest that even after accounting for age effects, accuracy on the tasks is not related to shyness. Further ongoing extensions include frame-by-frame coding to examine more fine-grained behaviors and analysis via a mixed model regression. Understanding temperamental impacts on language assessments is essential to formulate methods to deal with the variation.