Influence of shyness on language assessment
Abstract
Purpose: One understudied component that can influence children's performance on language assessments is shyness. The goal of this study is to examine how shyness affects a child's performance on language assessments which vary in sociability. We hypothesized that accuracy on language tasks would be driven by shyness such that shy children would perform better on non-sociable tasks compared to sociable tasks. Methods: The procedures followed a quasi-experimental design. 122 participants, ages 17-to-42 months, varied in their temperament and each underwent a series of language tasks. The order of tasks was randomized and included three different language tasks that varied in the social interaction required: a looking task, pointing task, and production task. Parents reported their child's shyness level via the ECBQ. Data was collected via Zoom. Results: Shyness was compared with participant's accuracy across the three tests while controlling for age and vocabulary percentile. There were significant differences in children's performance across the tasks, with respect to shyness. Shyer children performed much worse on the production task compared to less shy children (β = -.05, p = .033). For the pointing task, shyness interacted with age to impact performance (β = -.37, p= .042). Shyness had no impact on performance on the looking task (β = .03, p = .10). Conclusions: As shown by these results, shy children and less shy children respond differentially to three methods of language assessment. It is important for clinicians to acknowledge shyness when choosing an appropriate assessment of children's language. Future direction includes examining in-person effects of shyness on language assessment.