Purpose: This longitudinal study assessed continuity and stability of productive language (vocabulary and grammar) and discourse features (turn-taking; asking and responding to questions) during mother-child play. Method: Parent-child language use in 119 Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children at two ages (M = 2.5 and 3.6…

This study examines whether an e-book with a dictionary could support parents' mediation of new words during shared book reading, more than the child's independent reading of an e-book with and without a dictionary. The participants included 128 kindergartners and 64 mothers who were randomly divided into four groups: independent reading of the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate language growth in individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) from early childhood to adolescence and the influence of maternal responsivity on language growth. Method: We conducted a longitudinal analysis of language development in 55 youths (44 males, 11 females) with FXS. Data collection spanned…

The paper reports on a study designed to develop a risk model that can best predict single-word spelling in seven-year-old children when they were aged 4 and 5. Test measures, personal characteristics and environmental influences were all considered as variables from a community sample of 971 children. Strong concurrent correlations were found…

Research Findings: Grounded in the investment model and informed by the integrative theory of the study of minority children, this study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort data set, a nationally representative sample of young children, to investigate whether the association between socioeconomic status (family income and…

This study examined interactions between preschool children and parents during shared book reading by analyzing parental self-report data. Using confirmatory factor analytic procedures and structural equation modeling, this study developed a scale measuring meaning-related and print-related reading interactions and examined their associations with…

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…

This study examined the impact of training mothers to talk elaboratively about the past on children's understanding of mind. The researchers randomly assigned 102 mothers of 19-month-old children to a training or no-training group. Mothers in the experimental group received training in an elaborative style of talking about the past when children…

The purposes of the study were to determine (a) the ability of two spontaneous language measures, mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU-m) and number of different words (NDW), to identify African American preschool children at low and high levels of language ability; (b) whether child chronological age was related to the performance of either…