VEPS - Very Early Processing Skills
About the VEPS project
The VEPS project is about the early identification of children who will go on to have difficulties with language and communication, and the sort of problems they will have. The idea behind the project is that certain Very Early Processing Skills (VEPS) that are known to underpin children's language and communication will tell us about their later skills and difficulties.
The project focuses on two set of skills that emerge in the first year of life:
- Skills in dealing with the sound patterns of language - these are important for children to recognise, remember and produce words and combinations of words
- Skills in engaging with other people and noticing what they are attending to - these are important for children to discover the meanings of words.
We created four new assessments to measure these skills:
- Preschool Repetition Test
- Assessment of Social Responsiveness
- Assessment of Joint Attention
- Assessment of Symbolic Comprehension
In the VEPS project, we administered these assessments, together with a standard test of receptive and expressive language, to a large cohort of children who were referred to clinical services at 2-3 years. We followed the children up at 4-5 years, and again at 10-11 years. In the first follow-up, we investigated the extent to which children's performance on our VEPS and language measures at 2-3 years predicted their language and social communication skills at 4-5 years.
In the second follow-up, we assessed the children's language, social communication, reading, and attention skills at 10-11 years. Our key aim was to find out what our early measures tell us about skills that should be firmly established by the late primary school years, in readiness for the important transition to secondary school.
The VEPS project has been funded by two Economic and Social Research Council grants: Award number RES-000-23-0019 (2002-6) and Award Number RES-000-22-4093 (2010-11).