This article seeks to reframe how early childhood educators think about their role in play by answering these questions: What really matters in play? How should we spend our time and energy planning, implementing, and building our expertise around play in early childhood teaching and learning? The answers reside in 5 big ideas from play research…

Preverbal communication means any social behavior that occurs before children communicate verbally. Generally, these communicative behaviors are categorized into two ways: as behavior regulation (BR) or joint attention (JA) skills. BR, also referred to as requesting, involves the use of behaviors to gain something or receive assistance (Mundy et…

Alteration of the organization of social and motivational neuroanatomical circuitry must have been an essential step in the evolution of human language. Development of vocal communication across species, particularly birdsong, and new research on the neural organization and evolution of social and motivational circuitry, together suggest that…

This paper makes an attempt to highlight the significance of Chomskyan concepts of linguistic and cognitivism in restructuring educational ideals and directions regarding learning in Educational Psychology. His specific views on educational aspects are the need of the hour in education scenario especially in the context of globalization. This…

Language development in typically developing children has a very predictable pattern beginning with crying, cooing, babbling, and gestures along with the recognition of spoken words, comprehension of spoken words, and then one word utterances. This predictable pattern breaks down for children with language disorders. This article will discuss…

There are many kinds of speech and language disorders that can affect children. This fact sheet will present four major areas in which these impairments occur. These are the areas of: (1) Articulation; (2) Fluency; (3) Voice; and (4) Language. Following a brief narrative on a day in the life of a Speech Language Pathologist, this fact sheet…

For more than 25 years people have known that children and adults with Down syndrome have a specific impairments in working memory. Within the working memory system, they have particular difficulty with the verbal short-term memory part of the system. However, memory training may become more popular as recent work with both children with Down…

Discusses design and development issues in creating an interactive Web site for the field of communication disorders. Describes Vocaldevelopment.com, an interactive Web site that provides students, professionals, and parents with audio-recordings of infant vocalizations and information regarding intervention practices for infants and toddlers with…

Discusses Braga's contribution to the study of the sociology of language. Braga developed a dynamic interdisciplinary model of verbal communication based on theories of sociology and linguistics and stressed the importance of language in the acculturation of an individual and in the determination of that individual's status in society. (CFM)

The article describes a model for teaching conversational skills to young communicatively handicapped children in the context of everyday activities in the preschool setting. Structured around initiation and participation strategies, intervention emphasizes the interaction of adult teaching and child learning strategies. (JW)

This paper presents a response to five commentaries on our article "An Analysis of Autism as a Contingency-Shaped Disorder of Verbal Behavior" (Drash & Tudor, 2004). One of the principal objectives of that article is to provide the behavior analysis community and the autism community with a conceptual basis for analyzing autism as a behavioral…

Disfluencies in the verbal and signed language of a 10-year-old moderately mentally retarded boy were analyzed. Discussion addresses implications for the accurate characterization of stuttering in manual communication and appropriate approaches to management in such cases. (DB)

Recommends talking to children to help them develop language skills. Identifies daily routines (mealtime, bath time, dressing, play) as ideal opportunities to engage in parallel talk, describing out loud what the child is seeing, hearing, or thinking during the activity and suggests self-talk as parents perform routine actions around the home.…

In this article, the author narrates how her son's communication skills have progressed through the use of photographic visuals. Her son, Ryan, was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was aged two years and seven months. At this time he was unresponsive to his name, had virtually no words and definitely no comprehension of…

Pretend play and language growth are related through representational thought. Fundamental to representational thought are five connectives, at the theoretical level, which link pretend play and language growth: motor actions, roles and role changes, creative expression, concentration, and decentration. At the research level, results of selected…