This study examined the extent to which classroom quality (emotional and instructional climate) moderates the associations between teachers' beliefs about children, self-efficacy, and children's early language gains (receptive and expressive vocabulary). The study employed multilevel modeling with 606 preschool teachers and 2,536 preschool…

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…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder sometimes spontaneously repeat clinician models of morphemes targeted for treatment. We examine how spontaneous repeating of clinician models in the form of recasts associates with improved child production of those emerging morphemes. Method: Forty-seven preschool children with developmental…

Social mastery motivation and parental response are important correlates of children's vocabulary and self-regulation skills, but little research has examined their relationships collectively. This study investigated the direct relationships among social mastery motivation (active interaction and positive affect frequencies), parental response,…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

Purpose: This feasibility study examines the convergent and divergent validity of the Grammaticality and Utterance Length Instrument (GLi), a tool designed to assess the grammaticality and average utterance length of a child's prerecorded story retell. Method: Three raters used the GLi to rate audio-recorded story retells from 100 English-speaking…

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…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive…

Preschool children begin to represent spoken language in print long before receiving formal instruction in spelling and writing. The current study sought to identify the component skills that contribute to preschool children's ability to begin to spell words and write their name. Ninety-five preschool children (mean age = 57 months) completed a…

Oral language and word reading skills have important effects on reading comprehension. The Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Third Edition (WIAT-III) measures both skill sets, but little is known about their specific effects on reading comprehension within this battery. Path analysis was used to evaluate the collective effects of reading and…

The relationship among bodily movements, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement in children is receiving considerable attention in the research community. The embodied learning approach is based on the idea of an inseparable link between body and mind in learning, aiming for teaching methods that promote children's active engagement in the…

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…

Understanding differences in oral language abilities is vital, particularly for children from low-income homes and minority children who are at an increased risk for academic failure because of differences or deficits in language use or exposure before they enter school. The purpose of this study was to investigate oral language performance,…

We examined the relations between teachers' use of comments during book reading sessions in preschool classrooms and the vocabulary growth of children with low and moderately low language ability. Using data from a larger randomized controlled trial, we analyzed comments defined as utterances that give, explain, expand, or define. Comments were…