The purpose of this study is to examine the bidirectional relationship between children's language development and challenging behaviors as well as the moderating roles of gender and race/ethnicity. We conducted a number of structural equation modeling analyses with a national representative sample (N = 2,462) of Head Start children from the 2014…

Background: Deafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language…

Bilingual experience has an impact on an individual's linguistic processing and general cognitive abilities. The relation between these linguistic and non-linguistic domains, in turn, is mediated by individual linguistic proficiency and developmental changes that take place across the lifespan. This study evaluated this relationship by assessing…

The robust relation between maternal education and child language that is observed in monolingual populations has not been reliably replicated among bilingual children from immigrant families in the United States. We hypothesized that a variable that operates in immigrant populations--the language in which mothers achieved their highest level of…

Some reports suggest that there is an increase in the number of children identified as having developmental language impairment (Bercow, 2008). yet resource issues have meant that many speech and language therapy services have compromised provision in some way. Thus, efficient ways of identifying need and prioritizing intervention are required.…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…

Purpose: Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., "telephone" in English and "teléfono" in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates ("table"/"mesa"). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants included Spanish-English…

Background: Language development has been characterised by significant individual stability from school entry. However, the extent to which trajectories of language growth vary in children with language disorder as a function of co-occurring developmental challenges is a question of theoretical import, with implications for service provision.…

This study used data from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) 2009 4-year-old cohort to examine associations among family characteristics, home and classroom environments, and the emergent literacy skills of Head Start children. Results from hierarchical linear models suggest that both family and classroom contexts play a…

Expressive language is an important skill to develop in children with intellectual disabilities. It not only aids in decreasing the likelihood of challenging behaviors from occurring but also aids in increasing the individuals independence and assistance in them becoming successful members of society. No previous studies have examined the…

Purpose: In this article, the authors sought to determine whether the precise age of implantation (AOI) remains an important predictor of spoken language outcomes in later childhood for those who received a cochlear implant (CI) between 12 and 38 months of age. Relative advantages of receiving a bilateral CI after age 4.5 years, better…

This brief report focusing on children' s kindergarten readiness i s the third in a series of reports describing data from the 2009 cohort of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES 2009). Previous FACES 2009 reports described the characteristics of children and their families and programs as they entered Head Start in fall 2009…

This study used a mail survey to gather information from 409 school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the state of Michigan regarding the types of language assessment procedures they employed when assessing children's language skills. Descriptive data regarding respondents' demographic, caseload, and employment characteristics were also…

Purpose: Personal narratives are common in children's conversations, recommended as the appropriate genre for early writing by educators, and part of many high-stakes tests, possibly because they tend to be better formed than fictional narratives. However, current practice in the field of speech-language pathology employs fictional narratives in…