Research Findings: This study investigated the effectiveness of a home-based intervention in increasing the intrinsic reading motivation and Chinese oral vocabulary of minority South Asian children in Hong Kong. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 78 children (M[subscript age] = 51.54 months; control: 37 children, intervention: 41 children) and…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine mothers' sophisticated vocabulary while reminiscing with their preschool-aged children, and its relation to children's story comprehension. The study used a cross-lagged panel design in which all assessments were collected twice, 6 months apart. We also compared two methods of examining…

Research Findings: The study examined the relationship between Spanish-speaking DLL children's engagement within the preschool classroom with teachers, peers, and tasks and their school readiness skills compared to monolingual English-speaking peers. Results suggested that DLL children had lower language skills and phonological awareness by the…

Research Findings Research suggests children from low-income environments have vocabularies that differ from those of their higher-income peers. They may have basic knowledge of many words of which children from higher income environments have acquired sub- or supra-ordinate knowledge. This study sought to determine if children from low-income…

Research findings: This study examined the dual language development and experience of the understudied Chinese dual language learners (DLLs). Twice in the preschool/pre-k year (about 4 months apart), we assessed 39 Chinese 3- and 4-year-old DLLs' receptive vocabularies in English and Chinese, interviewed 37 parents about the language use and…

Research Findings: Are family literacy activities linked to gains in preschool-aged dual language learners' (DLLs') societal language vocabulary? To understand connections between literacy activities and vocabulary, we separately considered literacy activities in the respective heritage language and in the societal language, German, and accounted…

Rejection by peers has devastating effects on children's social-cognitive development. As language difficulties have been found to be one of the underlying causes of peer rejection, the present study focused on the relation between these two variables. Specifically, this study was the first to test a hypothesized model connecting children's level…

Research Findings: Children learn most of their vocabulary incidentally, by hearing words used in their environment. This study explored which kinds of presentations of words, without any direct instruction, yielded greater depth of target word knowledge. Changes in 56 kindergartners' depth of knowledge for each of 23 novel target words (N =…

Research Findings: A social validity measure was used to examine 56 bilingual preschool teachers' perceptions and acceptability of an interactive shared book reading vocabulary intervention implemented in English with Spanish-speaking preschool children (N = 334) in a dual language program model. Social validity outcomes indicated that bilingual…

Research Findings: This study of kindergarten monolingual and Dual Language Learners (DLLs) (N=263; mean age = 63.40 months) and their teachers (N=27) found significant mean differences in the observed quality of language interactions in classrooms with differing proportions of DLLs. Teachers instructing in classrooms with higher numbers of DLLs…

Research Findings: A growing emphasis in the literature on children's self-regulation signals the need for increased understanding of the ways in which young children become active players in the acquisition of knowledge. In particular, self-regulation may be linked to subsequent academic achievement through greater engagement with the learning…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

The purpose of the present study was to examine associations among English and Spanish emergent literacy skills of prekindergarten (pre-K) Spanish-speaking dual language learners in relation to their English invented spelling. Study participants included 141 Spanish-speaking 4-year-old children enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs in a large…

Research Findings: This study examines lexical- and sentence-level dimensions of academic language to describe teachers' natural use of academic language and its association with vocabulary growth in 489 at-risk 4-year-olds enrolled in Head Start preschool classrooms. Using transcripts derived from video recordings of book-reading sessions in 52…

Research Findings: The contribution of 3 executive function skills (shifting, inhibitory control, and working memory) and their relation to early mathematical skills was investigated with preschoolers attending 6 Head Start centers. Ninety-two children ranging in age from 3 years, 1 month, to 4 years, 11 months, who were native English or Spanish…