Purpose: Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell,…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

It is common in intervention research to use measures of working memory either as an explanatory or a control variable. This study examines the contribution of cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory (WM) and attention, to language performance in first- and second-grade children. We assessed children (N = 414) on two forms of verbal…

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information…

Purpose: This study examined the vocabulary words and multiword sequences used by 124 typically developing kindergarten and 1st-grade students when they wrote about self-selected topics. The study extends previous research by examining the vocabulary used in different genres. Method: A total of 457 writing samples were analyzed. The samples were…

Narrative competence can be considered an indicator of children's knowledge about other people's minds. The present study investigates the relations between, on the one hand, children's narrative competence and their second order language of mind (comprehension of deception) and, on the other, their developmental trends from kindergarten to…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

Purpose: This study examined child production of narrative features and of African American English (AAE) during a wordless storybook oral narrative task. Method: Participants were 30 AAE-speaking African American kindergarten and 1st grade students from low- and mid-socioeconomic status homes. Story grammar (SG), story literary technique (SLT),…

We compare learning of two inflection types--obligatory noun plurals and optional noun possessives. We tested 107 Hebrew-speaking children aged 6-7 on the same tasks at the beginning and end of first grade. Performance on both constructions improved during this short period, but plurals scored higher from the start, with improvement only in…

Effective early language and literacy instruction to remediate language deficits and to prevent problems in learning to read is an important area for intervention research. Children with early language deficits who are growing up in poverty are dually at risk. Early deficits in language development predict both continued delays in language…

Examines factors that contributed to unexpectedly large gains in verbal competence among a diverse and representative sample of urban first graders. Concludes that exceptionally high growth in the first grade is associated prominently with the characteristics of teachers and the maturity/personality and academic self-image of the students.…

Examines requests and responses of first-grade children in peer reading groups and concludes that children differ in the variety and complexity of their requests. (FL)

Research has been conducted regarding the linguistic structure of children's language usage. There has not, however, been an attempt to relate children's knowledge of vocabulary to their teachers' use of vocabulary. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the vocabulary used by teachers and the proportion of that…

The basic objective of this research was to determine whether educators were justified in lumping togetner all Negro speech as "Negro Dialect" or whether there were wide variations within the inner city Negro community which educators should take into account when preparing reading materials. Thirty first-grade Negro children were…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether by structuring and sequencing the same monosyllabic CVC, CVVC, and CVCe English words in two different patterns (EI and EII), administered with the same controlled procedures, boys and girls in grade one would be facilitated in detecting, identifying, and discriminating among single vowels and…