We Learn Together is a 20-week, low-cost infant/toddler school-readiness intervention developed to provide instructional content and supportive tools for teachers to be more explicit and intentional in interactions with children to support early development. Short-term effects were established in a previously published real-world effectiveness…

Background: Children born with a cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP ± L) are known to be at risk for speech-language disorders that impact educational and social-emotional growth. It is hypothesized that speech-language intervention delivered before the age of 3 years could decrease the impact of CP ± L on speech-language development.…

Creating an environment suitable for language acquisition through shared reading significantly contributes to improving a child's language development and parent-child relationship. Reading in an interactive way, such as dialogic reading, is favorable. Nevertheless, dialogic reading is designed for children above the age of two and shared reading…

Findings are presented from a study examining the effects of the home-based intervention 'Growing: Birth to Three' (GBT) on children born prematurely at a regional hospital in Norway over a four-year period. Nineteen children received the intervention, while 17 children comprised the control group. Results indicate that GBT had a positive effect…

In early 2017, Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) was awarded $2 million in funding from the governor of Georgia to be used for infant/toddler (I/T) language and literacy activities. DECAL used this funding to create Project LITTLE (Lifting Infants and Toddlers Through Language-rich Environments). Project…

This pilot study conducted an initial evaluation of the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE) Infant-Toddler Teacher Training program. The program is unique in three ways: 1) use of an online platform with courses that explain social-emotional, language, and literacy development in young children…

Developing strong language and communication skills in the first years of life provides young children with a foundation for a number of positive outcomes, including school readiness, early literacy skills, and self-regulation. High quality language supports in early childhood education programs are key to this development. Part of providing these…

Being able to communicate one's wants and needs is an essential step in typical language development. However, children with diagnosed language delays, which constitute approximately 5-10% of children under three years, may reach this step later than typically developing children. According to Rossetti (2001), communication skills are the most…

Purpose: This article reports preliminary outcomes from a service-learning (SL) experience for graduate students in the Speech-Language Pathology program with incarcerated mothers who reside with their infants at a residential parenting program. We present an ecological model to serve as a framework for interpreting the impact of the experience on…

In some areas of rural Africa, long-standing cultural traditions and beliefs may discourage parents from verbally engaging with their young children. This study assessed the effectiveness of a parenting program designed to encourage verbal engagement between caregivers and infants in Wolof-speaking villages in rural Senegal. Caregivers (n = 443)…

This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to estimate the separate effects of the starting age, program duration, and persistence of impacts of early childhood education programs on children's cognitive and achievement outcomes. It concentrates on studies published before the wide scale penetration of state-pre-K programs. Specifically, data are…

While most early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs taken to scale in the United States have served socially disadvantaged 3- to 5-years-olds, Norway scaled up universal ECEC from age 1. We investigated the consequences of Norway's universal ECEC scale-up for children's early language skills, exploiting variation in ECEC coverage across…

Background: Dialogic book-sharing is an interactive form of shared reading. It has been shown in high income countries (HICs) to be of significant benefit to child cognitive development. Evidence for such benefit in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is scarce, although a feasibility study of our own produced encouraging findings.…

Globally, at least 200 million children younger than five years old are falling short of their potential for development and growth. There is some evidence that improvements to children's health, nutrition, and development outcomes can be made through programs that provide direct learning experiences to children and families; are targeted toward…

The purpose of this study was to develop a book sharing intervention to support the language development of infants and toddlers from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Low-income parents were engaged in a collaborative inquiry to develop "Little Talks." Parents were assigned to three small groups that independently…