2021/12/21 by Knowland, Victoria, Rauni, Mohreet, Gaskell, M. Gareth +4
#Actigraphy #CCC-2 #CSHQ #Language Disorder #Sleep
paper · doi:10.34842/fs09-ga12
Sleep and language are intimately linked over childhood, yet objective measurements of sleep behaviour have never been compared between children with developmental disorders of language and their language-typical peers. The aim of this two-study series was to assess an emergent hypothesis that children with poor structural language development may also exhibit poor sleep. In Study 1, 196 parents of 4-10 year-old children completed the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire and the Children’s Communication Checklist-2, including the parents of 61 children with reported language disorder. Parent-reported sleep behaviour and language ability showed a positive correlation, with children who scored more highly on the language measure showing better sleep behaviour. Interestingly, parental estimates of sleep duration showed an unexpected reverse pattern, with children who scored lower on the language measure being reported to go to bed earlier and sleep for longer than their peers. In Study 2, a subsample of 20 4-to-6 year-old children with language disorder and 20 language-typical age-matched peers contributed objective, actigraphy-derived estimates of sleep duration, efficiency and onset latency. Mirroring parental estimates in Study 1, actigraphy data showed the language disordered group slept for longer and more efficiently than their language-typical peers. We consider that parental perception of poor sleep behaviour in children with language difficulties may result from a history of poor sleep and/or from observed difficulties in sleep parameters that are not possible to assess with actigraphy. The data suggest that subjective reports of sleep behaviour and objective estimates of children’s sleep be thought of as complementary. Keywords: Sleep, Language Disorder, Actigraphy, CCC-2, CSHQ