Dorthe Bleses
Biographic Data
| ID | 4110590 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dorthe Bleses |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dorthe |
| FAMILY NAME | Bleses |
| SIGNATURE | BLESES D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1670-4742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Greater Sharing of Child Autobiographical Memories at Age 4 Anticipates Decreasing Parent Elaborations at Age 6
The present study examined longitudinal bidirectional associations from ages 4–6 between parent elaborations and child autobiographical memories in a parent-child reminiscing context. Danish-speaking parent-child dyads ( N = 179) participated twice in a shared reminiscing task, when children were, on average, 4.2 and 6.3 years old. Video recordings were transcribed and coded for parent elaborative utterances and child autobiographical memories. D…
Effects of an Infant/Toddler Intervention at 1-Year Follow-Up
We Learn Together is a 20-week, low-cost infant/toddler school-readiness intervention developed to provide instructional content and supportive tools for teachers to be more explicit and intentional in interactions with children to support early development. Short-term effects were established in a previously published real-world effectiveness randomized controlled trial. In the present quasi-experimental study, we examined the extent to which th…
How Does Representational Mind‐Mindedness Translate Into Observable Parenting Behaviors Among Parents of Six‐Year‐Olds
Mind‐Mindedness reflects parents' capacity to treat their child as an individual with a mind of their own. Research is lacking on how Representational Mind‐Mindedness (RMM) translates into observable parenting behaviours beyond infancy. The present study examined how RMM was associated with parents' Acknowledging Behaviour (AB) and use of Mental State Talk (MST), and whether these associations were moderated by parents' educational level. The sam…
Examining the effects of an infant-toddler school readiness intervention in center- and family-based programs
Infants and toddlers frequently participate in either center- or family-based childcare programs. However, little is known about the efficacy of early learning interventions introduced in these two types of programs, in particular family-based programs. The present work builds upon findings of a recent experimental trial demonstrating that a 20-week infant-toddler intervention supporting center- and family-based teachers to be more explicit and i…
A systematic literature review of math interventions across educational settings from early childhood education to high school
Early math skills lay the foundation for children’s long-term academic success. An increasing number of randomized controlled math interventions have been carried out across educational settings. The aim of the present systematic review was to identify the distribution of the randomized controlled math interventions conducted between 2001 and 2021 in educational settings across Early Childhood Education (ECE) up to high school among various sampl…
Prediction from early childhood vocabulary to academic achievement at the end of compulsory schooling in Denmark
Prediction from early development to later achievement has the potential to improve clinical and educational service delivery as well as to inform developmental theory. In this longitudinal study, we asked how well can educational achievement measured in the final year (Grade 9, age 15) of compulsory education—both overall and for outcomes in the lowest 20%—be predicted from information available in the first 3 years of life, particularly early e…
Direct and indirect effects from parenting self-efficacy and parenting practices to social-emotional adjustment in 3- to 5-year-old children
Parenting self-efficacy has been tied to myriad child outcomes during middle childhood and adolescence, directly and indirectly through parenting practices. The present study examines contemporaneous associations between parenting self-efficacy, parenting practices, and child outcomes during the preschool years in a community sample of 1455 Danish parents (76.7 % mothers) of 3-5-year-old children (49 % girls). Parents (M = 39.2 years old) complet…
Early childhood educator's implementation readiness and intervention fidelity
Research has indicated that early educators’ intervention fidelity is a significant predictor of children's responsiveness to classroom interventions. To improve understanding of predictors of intervention fidelity in early childhood settings, this study adopted a person-centered approach to identify profiles of “implementation readiness” in 1,192 Danish educators, and to examine relations with implementation fidelity. Multilevel latent profile a…
Implementing toddler interventions at scale
The first years of life are characterized by rapid learning in several school readiness domains, including language, math, and social-emotional skills, all of which are important for later childhood outcomes and academic achievement in school. In this research, we investigate the effects of an early-stage evidence-based school readiness intervention and add-on elements to support teachers’ implementation under real-life circumstances to explore t…
The relation of home literacy environments to language and preliteracy skills in single- and dual-language children in Danish childcare
Low-cost teacher-implemented intervention improves toddlers’ language and math skills
The first years of life are foundational for children's cognitive and social–emotional development and to subsequent development in a variety of domains. In many countries, an increasing number of toddlers is enrolled in early childhood education (ECE) programs, which can facilitate early development. However, the quality of these programs is often mediocre. The present study represents a large-scale randomized control trial (87 childcare centers…
When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing
Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large number of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition p…
Does mixing age groups in early childhood education settings support children’s language development
As early childhood education programming expands across the globe, there is an increased need to understand how features of these programs influence children’s development. The composition of children’s age within a classroom is one such feature, although it is much less studied than other features. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that children’s development may be influenced by the age range of their classmates. This study examines t…
Segmentation of Highly Vocalic Speech Via Statistical Learning
Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make speech in it intrinsically harder to segment than in closely related languages such as Norwegian. We …
Self-reported parental vocabulary input frequency for young children
Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12–36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated with both language sample based frequencies (0.67) and frequencies of a large written corpus of Danish …
Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition
The focus of this article is Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8–36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the Faroese adaptation of the MBCDI, and the second is to examine Faroese children’s early vocabulary acqui…
Effective language and literacy instruction
Early productive vocabulary predicts academic achievement 10 years later
We use a longitudinal design to examine associations for a diverse sample of 2,120 Danish 16- to 30-month-old children between early expressive vocabulary and later reading and math outcomes in the sixth grade. Educational outcomes, in particular decoding and reading comprehension, can be predicted from an early vocabulary measure as early as 16 months with effect sizes (in proportion of variance accounted for) comparable to 1 year's mean growth …
The effects of language- and literacy-focused professional development on early educators and children
The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories
This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gest…
The use of the Internet in collecting CDI data – an example from Norway
This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and…
Phonology and lexicon in a cross-linguistic perspective
In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and language-specific properties affect the interaction between lexical and phonological acquisition. In this regard, …
Clex
Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early gestures and symbolic actions. These lexical norms have a wide range of uses in basic research, assessm…
The Danish Communicative Developmental Inventories
This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in appropriate ways which makes it suitable for tapping into Danish children's language acquisition. The stud…
Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages
The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility of cross-linguistic CDI-comparisons. The main finding is that the developmental trend of Danish children…
The effects of language- and literacy-focused professional development on early educators and children
Effective language and literacy instruction
Gender differences in young children's speech
Many sociolinguistic studies have found that female speakers prefer standard speech forms while male speakers prefer vernacular forms. This article addresses two questions: (1) when does this split between male and female language occur in the language of young children; and (2) how do little boys and girls come to prefer linguistic features which are predominant in the language of adults? Two hypotheses accounting for the mechanisms of transmiss…
Low-cost teacher-implemented intervention improves toddlers’ language and math skills
The first years of life are foundational for children's cognitive and social–emotional development and to subsequent development in a variety of domains. In many countries, an increasing number of toddlers is enrolled in early childhood education (ECE) programs, which can facilitate early development. However, the quality of these programs is often mediocre. The present study represents a large-scale randomized control trial (87 childcare centers…
The relation of home literacy environments to language and preliteracy skills in single- and dual-language children in Danish childcare
Segmentation of Highly Vocalic Speech Via Statistical Learning
Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make speech in it intrinsically harder to segment than in closely related languages such as Norwegian. We …
Examining the effects of an infant-toddler school readiness intervention in center- and family-based programs
Infants and toddlers frequently participate in either center- or family-based childcare programs. However, little is known about the efficacy of early learning interventions introduced in these two types of programs, in particular family-based programs. The present work builds upon findings of a recent experimental trial demonstrating that a 20-week infant-toddler intervention supporting center- and family-based teachers to be more explicit and i…
Implementing toddler interventions at scale
The first years of life are characterized by rapid learning in several school readiness domains, including language, math, and social-emotional skills, all of which are important for later childhood outcomes and academic achievement in school. In this research, we investigate the effects of an early-stage evidence-based school readiness intervention and add-on elements to support teachers’ implementation under real-life circumstances to explore t…
When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing
Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large number of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition p…
Gender differences in young children's speech
Many sociolinguistic studies have found that female speakers prefer standard speech forms while male speakers prefer vernacular forms. This article addresses two questions: (1) when does this split between male and female language occur in the language of young children; and (2) how do little boys and girls come to prefer linguistic features which are predominant in the language of adults? Two hypotheses accounting for the mechanisms of transmiss…
The acquisition of spoken forms and written words
The present study examines the complex interactions between the spoken and the written language in twenty Funish children’s oral and written narratives and a read out task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. First, a comparison of the distribution of the reduction phenomena in the children’s language across the two spoken conditions was made. The second analysis looked at the distribution of spelling errors in the written …
Danish children's first words
Using the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), first language acquisition of 183 Danish children has been studied longitudinally on a monthly basis (8—30 months). Focussing on production, we study early lexical development from the very first word until roughly 100 words are produced, dividing this period into the stages of first-1, -10, -25, -50 and -100 words. We analyse Danish children's first w…
The Danish Communicative Developmental Inventories
This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in appropriate ways which makes it suitable for tapping into Danish children's language acquisition. The stud…
Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages
The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility of cross-linguistic CDI-comparisons. The main finding is that the developmental trend of Danish children…
Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars? Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children's first words
Based on data from the Danish Longitudinal CDI study on 182 Danish children, we analyse aspects of variation in the children's first 100 words (produced). First, we demonstrate the effect of gender and birth order (number of siblings) on acquisition times of first words by identifying single words which are significantly earlier in the productive repertoire of, for instance, girls versus boys. We also investigate the effect of the same factors on…
Clex
Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early gestures and symbolic actions. These lexical norms have a wide range of uses in basic research, assessm…
Phonology and lexicon in a cross-linguistic perspective
In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and language-specific properties affect the interaction between lexical and phonological acquisition. In this regard, …
The use of the Internet in collecting CDI data – an example from Norway
This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and…
The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories
This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages, it was found that vocabulary comprehension preceded vocabulary production, and that both use of gest…
Early productive vocabulary predicts academic achievement 10 years later
We use a longitudinal design to examine associations for a diverse sample of 2,120 Danish 16- to 30-month-old children between early expressive vocabulary and later reading and math outcomes in the sixth grade. Educational outcomes, in particular decoding and reading comprehension, can be predicted from an early vocabulary measure as early as 16 months with effect sizes (in proportion of variance accounted for) comparable to 1 year's mean growth …
The effects of language- and literacy-focused professional development on early educators and children
Effective language and literacy instruction
Self-reported parental vocabulary input frequency for young children
Vocabulary input frequency influences age of acquisition, and is also an essential control for investigating the influence of other factors. We propose a new method of frequency estimation, self-report. 918 Danish-speaking parents of 12–36-month-old children estimated their frequency of use of 725 words. Self-report was substantially correlated with both language sample based frequencies (0.67) and frequencies of a large written corpus of Danish …
Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition
The focus of this article is Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8–36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the Faroese adaptation of the MBCDI, and the second is to examine Faroese children’s early vocabulary acqui…
Does mixing age groups in early childhood education settings support children’s language development
As early childhood education programming expands across the globe, there is an increased need to understand how features of these programs influence children’s development. The composition of children’s age within a classroom is one such feature, although it is much less studied than other features. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that children’s development may be influenced by the age range of their classmates. This study examines t…
Segmentation of Highly Vocalic Speech Via Statistical Learning
Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make speech in it intrinsically harder to segment than in closely related languages such as Norwegian. We …
Low-cost teacher-implemented intervention improves toddlers’ language and math skills
The first years of life are foundational for children's cognitive and social–emotional development and to subsequent development in a variety of domains. In many countries, an increasing number of toddlers is enrolled in early childhood education (ECE) programs, which can facilitate early development. However, the quality of these programs is often mediocre. The present study represents a large-scale randomized control trial (87 childcare centers…
When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing
Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e., vowels and semivowels/glides). The large number of vocalic sounds in speech is thought to provide fewer cues to word segmentation and to make language processing harder, thus hindering the acquisition p…
Implementing toddler interventions at scale
The first years of life are characterized by rapid learning in several school readiness domains, including language, math, and social-emotional skills, all of which are important for later childhood outcomes and academic achievement in school. In this research, we investigate the effects of an early-stage evidence-based school readiness intervention and add-on elements to support teachers’ implementation under real-life circumstances to explore t…
The relation of home literacy environments to language and preliteracy skills in single- and dual-language children in Danish childcare
Direct and indirect effects from parenting self-efficacy and parenting practices to social-emotional adjustment in 3- to 5-year-old children
Parenting self-efficacy has been tied to myriad child outcomes during middle childhood and adolescence, directly and indirectly through parenting practices. The present study examines contemporaneous associations between parenting self-efficacy, parenting practices, and child outcomes during the preschool years in a community sample of 1455 Danish parents (76.7 % mothers) of 3-5-year-old children (49 % girls). Parents (M = 39.2 years old) complet…
Early childhood educator's implementation readiness and intervention fidelity
Research has indicated that early educators’ intervention fidelity is a significant predictor of children's responsiveness to classroom interventions. To improve understanding of predictors of intervention fidelity in early childhood settings, this study adopted a person-centered approach to identify profiles of “implementation readiness” in 1,192 Danish educators, and to examine relations with implementation fidelity. Multilevel latent profile a…
A systematic literature review of math interventions across educational settings from early childhood education to high school
Early math skills lay the foundation for children’s long-term academic success. An increasing number of randomized controlled math interventions have been carried out across educational settings. The aim of the present systematic review was to identify the distribution of the randomized controlled math interventions conducted between 2001 and 2021 in educational settings across Early Childhood Education (ECE) up to high school among various sampl…
Prediction from early childhood vocabulary to academic achievement at the end of compulsory schooling in Denmark
Prediction from early development to later achievement has the potential to improve clinical and educational service delivery as well as to inform developmental theory. In this longitudinal study, we asked how well can educational achievement measured in the final year (Grade 9, age 15) of compulsory education—both overall and for outcomes in the lowest 20%—be predicted from information available in the first 3 years of life, particularly early e…
Psychology (29 works) · Developmental psychology (23 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (15 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (13 works) · Language Development and Disorders (11 works) · Mathematics education (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Danish (8 works) · Language development (8 works)