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Updated: Oct 30, 2025

Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Does Early Child Language Predict Internalizing Symptoms in Adolescence? An Investigation in Two Birth Cohorts Born
Emma Thornton1, Praveetha Patalay2, Danielle Matthews3
1University of Liverpool.
Abstract:
Language is vital for social interaction, leading some to suggest early linguistic ability paves the way for good adolescent mental health. The relation between age-5 vocabulary and adolescent internalizing symptoms was examined in two U.K. birth cohorts that are nationally representative in terms of sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status: the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS; N = 11,640) and the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS born ~2001; N = 14,754). In the BCS, no relation between receptive vocabulary and age-16 self-reported symptoms was observed (β = 0.00 [-0.03; 0.03]). In the MCS, better expressive vocabulary was associated with more age-14 self-reported symptoms (β = 0.05 [0.02; 0.07]). The direction of this effect was reversed for parent-reported symptoms. All effect sizes were small. The relation between childhood vocabulary and internalizing symptoms varies by generation and reporter.
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