This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention…

This study investigated the impact of an emergent literacy intervention on the language quality and quantity used during shared reading interactions of 14 teenage mothers (M = 19;9, SD = 1;3) and their young children (M = 2;1, SD = 0;8). Mothers participated in a seven-week emergent literacy intervention focused on a range of behaviours they could…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of variability in teaching prepositions to preschoolers with typical development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Input variability during teaching can enhance learning, but is target dependent. We hypothesized that high variability of objects would improve preposition learning.…

Parents often turn to educators and healthcare professionals for advice on how to best support their child's language development. These professionals frequently suggest implementing the "one-parent-one-language" approach to ensure consistent exposure to both languages. The goal of this study was to understand how language exposure influences the…

There is considerable debate regarding the simplification of adults' language when talking to young children with expressive language delays (ELD). While simplified input, also called telegraphic speech, is used by many parents and clinicians working with young children, its use has been discouraged in much of the clinical literature. In addition…

This article reviews the nature and function of recasts, a well-documented way of responding to young children. The paper challenges the definition of recast and argues that it is too broad a category to be useful, either for theories of language development or for practice. In particular, various forms of recast have featured in intervention…

This study compared the language behaviours of parents of toddlers with language delay (LD) and language of parents of typically developing toddlers (LN). Results indicate that parents of children with a language delay and children with normal language produced comparable amounts of linguistic input, but differed on some qualitative measures.…