Purpose: Understanding what is known about the language profiles of children with hearing loss (CHL) is vital so that researchers and teachers can identify the specific complex syntactic structures that CHL may struggle to master. An understanding of which aspects of complex syntax pose difficulties for CHL is necessary to inform the kind of…

Many parents in the UK enrol their children in Greek supplementary schools so the children can learn and maintain the Greek language and culture in parallel with English mainstream education. Despite fears about the effects of this heritage language (Greek) use on children's skills in the majority language (English), research on these somewhat…

Autistic children have difficulties in adapting their language for particular listeners and contexts. We asked whether these difficulties are more prominent when children are required to be cognitively flexible, when changing how they have previously referred to a particular object. We compared autistic (N = 30) with neuro-typical 5- to…

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit challenges with reading development. Evidence-based interventions and specialized approaches to reading instruction are currently being implemented across educational contexts for learners with ASD (Machalicek et al., 2008), yet there is limited understanding of how core ASD features may…

Research Findings: The present study investigates both the proximal processes and contextual influences on children's oral language development in preschool. We examine whether teacher language practices vary across activity settings and program type, which teacher language practices predict children's oral language skills, and potential…

Purpose: We compared outcomes from 2 measures of language ability in children who displayed a range of dialect variation: 1 using features that do not contrast between mainstream American English (MAE) and nonmainstream dialects (NMAE), and 1 using contrastive features. We investigated how modified scoring procedures affected the diagnostic…

Research Findings: This study examined preschool teachers' literal talk (LT) and inferential talk (IT) during shared book readings in early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) classrooms. We aimed to characterize and compare teachers' LT and IT in these 2 classroom contexts and determine whether differences in LT…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the role that the first language (L1), Spanish, at Pre-Kindergarten plays in predicting second language (L2), English, word reading in first grade. In addition, it examines the role of conceptual vocabulary in predicting word reading in English. Method: As part of a longitudinal study of…