This study evaluated the effect of peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) intervention on the language and story comprehension skills of two kindergartners with developmental delays from a special education class while reading a digital storybook. The study was conducted in Taiwan with participants who spoke Mandarin Chinese. This study was a…

"Tender Shoots" compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The "Rich Reading and Reminiscing" (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the "Strengthening Sound Sensitivity" (SSS) condition taught parents to converse…

Reading and telling stories to children improves their narrative skills, which is well-documented for monolinguals, but not for bilinguals. We investigated whether bilingual narratives improve when the child is provided with a model story. We studied the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children (n = 75, mean age 5;7 years; months) raised in…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

There are numerous studies showing processing advantages for collocations, but none of them so far takes into account the fact that the morphological form of a collocation varies to fit the context. Questions whether collocations retain their processing advantage when their morphological form changes and how or if different morphological forms of…

The ability to deduce implicit information about relations in a text (i.e., inferencing) is essential to understanding that text. Hence, there is increasing attention for supporting inferencing skills among children in early literacy programs including shared book reading interventions. This study investigated whether embedding scripted…

The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

When preschoolers listen to storybooks, are their eye movements related to their vocabulary acquisition in this context? This study addressed this question with 36 four-year-old French-speaking participants by assessing their general receptive vocabulary knowledge and knowledge of low-frequency words in 3 storybooks. These books were read verbatim…

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). "Cognition, 58", 197-219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and…