Overview

The Early Language in Victoria Study (ELVS) aims to learn more about how language develops from infancy (eight months) to adolescence and in particular, why language development is more difficult for some children. This information will be helpful in developing early intervention and prevention programs for children.

Lily Farrington's Amazing Developmental Language Disorder Animation

Lily, a young woman with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) explains what it is like to live with this condition. Everyone who watches this video will learn something valuable about DLD. Made by @ilaria.illustrates (on Instagram).

Information for participants

The last three years have been exciting and busy as we collected your questionnaires and analysed the data! Thank you so much for participating in the 13-year-old follow-up.

We hope to follow up again with all the participants soon. To make sure we have the correct contact details for you, please keep in touch. We would love to hear from you.

What has happened so far?

Recruitment: ELVS Babies

The Early Language in Victoria Study (ELVS) began in September 2003, and over 1900 families joined ELVS when their babies were eight to 10 months old. ELVS continued following the children until September 2007, when they had all turned four.

ELVS Children

In 2008, ELVS families were invited to take part in a new and exciting phase of the study. The aim was to understand language and reading development in the early school years. We are delighted that many families have agreed to continue on our ELVS journey with us.

ELVS Adolescents

In 2012, the ELVS team was successful in receiving funding to follow up all the children now they are adolescents. Almost 1000 children were close to their 11th birthday, and parents and teachers provided data via questionnaires about communication and literacy skills. In 2016, researchers continued to collect data as the ELVS participants turned 13 years old. This has been helping provide some of the most comprehensive data ever gathered to examine how language continues to develop as children move into adolescence and settle in to secondary school.

What’s next?

ELVS families have so far helped researchers understand many aspects of communication development, including:

• Language
• Stuttering
• Genes and language development
• Multilingual development
• Speech sound disorders
• Links between memory and language
• Autistic spectrum disorder

ELVS is very lucky to have such committed families taking part in the years. We are now looking at the best approaches to keep in touch with our participants as they get ready to transition from secondary school.

Research team

ELVS is a longitudinal study of language development in Victorian children funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

The study has been approved by the Royal Children's Hospital Ethics Committee and the Human Ethics in Research Committee at La Trobe University.

The study is based at The Royal Children's Hospital and the researchers are from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney. The team includes speech pathologists, a paediatrician, psychologists, linguists, researchers, biostatisticians and an epidemiologist.

Professor Sheena Reilly
Honorary Fellow
Available for Student Supervision

Publications

Cook F, Conway L, Omerovic E, Cahir P, Giallo R, Hiscock H, Mensah F, Bretherton L, Bavin E, Eadie P, Brown S. (2021). Infant regulation: Associations with child language development in a longitudinal cohort. The Journal of Pediatrics. Feb 4.

Eadie P, Bavin EL, Bretherton L, Cook F, Gold L, Mensah F, Wake M, Reilly S. (2021). Predictors in infancy for language and academic outcomes at 11 years. Pediatrics. 147(2).

Cook F, Hippmann D, Omerovic E. (2020). The sleep and mental health of gifted children: A prospective, longitudinal, community cohort study. Gifted and Talented International. 35(1):16-26.

Pigdon L, Willmott C, Reilly S, Conti-Ramsden G, Liegeois F, Connelly A, Morgan AT. (2020). The neural basis of nonword repetition in children with developmental speech or language disorder: An fMRI study. Neuropsychologia. 138:107312.

Pigdon L, Willmott C, Reilly S, Conti-Ramsden G, Morgan AT. (2020). What predicts nonword repetition performance?. Child Neuropsychology. 26(4):518-33.

Unicomb R, Kefalianos E, Reilly S, Cook F, Morgan A. (2020). Prevalence and features of comorbid stuttering and speech sound disorder at age 4 years. Journal of Communication Disorders. 84:105976.

Westerveld MF, Paynter J, Brignell A, Reilly S. (2020). No differences in code-related emergent literacy skills in well-matched 4-year-old children with and without ASD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 50(8):3060-3065.