This study contrasted the early literacy outcomes of children who are hard of hearing (CHH) with children with normal hearing (CNH). At age 5, prereading skills of oral language, phonological processing, and print knowledge were examined in CHH (N = 180) and CNH (N = 80). The CHH had poorer oral language and phonological processing abilities than…

We examined the bidirectional relations between home literacy environment, reading interest, and children's emergent literacy and reading skills in a sample of 172 English-speaking Canadian children (M[subscript age] = 75.87 months) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results of cross-lagged analysis revealed that the reading comprehension…

Variability in children's language acquisition is likely due to a number of cognitive and social variables. The current study investigated whether individual differences in statistical learning (SL), which has been implicated in language acquisition, independently predicted 6- to 8-year-old's comprehension of syntax. Sixty-eight (N = 68)…

A crucial part of language development is learning how various social and contextual language-external factors constrain an utterance's meaning. This learning process is poorly understood. Five experiments addressed one hundred thirty-one 3- to 5-year-old children's use of one such socially relevant information source: talker characteristics.…

Two studies were conducted to investigate the specificity of the relationship between preschoolers' emerging executive functioning skills and false belief understanding. Study 1 (N=44) showed that 3- to 5-year-olds' performance on an executive functioning task that required selective suppression of actions predicted performance on false belief…