Purpose: Word learning requires the creation of phonological and semantic representations and links in long-term memory. Phonological distance of a given word from the spoken language affects children's lexical-phonological representations and processing. The study investigates the role of the phonological distance of Modern Standard Arabic (StA)…

Purpose: This study investigated component skills in oral language development utilizing and validating a new assessment battery in a large (N = 800) and representative sample of Greek students 4-7 years of age. Method: All participants enrolled in public schools from four geographical regions (Attica, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Crete) that varied…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

This paper reports on part of the first phase of a longitudinal project investigating the development of academic language in English as the Language of Teaching and Learning (LoLT) by Foundation phase learners in two different educational contexts. In the first context, the learners were all English additional language (EAL) learners taught by…

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of phonology, orthography, and morphology to biliteracy acquisition in 78 Grade 1 Chinese-English bilingual children. Conceptually comparable measures in English and Chinese tapping phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness were administered. Word reading skill in English and…

Presents a framework for relating degree of bilingualism to aspects of linguistic awareness. Found the more fully bilingual a child was, the better his or her performance on metalinguistic tasks requiring high levels of analysis of knowledge. (SKC)

To investigate whether the viewing of printed words influences children's ability to produce plural forms, 120 kindergarten and first grade children were tested individually on 36 items consisting of real words and nonsense syllables that represented three categories: words that required pronouncing the "s" sound as the natural oral plural; words…

This article describes the experience of grade one through two students with language disorders as they put together the parts of literacy knowledge necessary for each to discover a writing process that produced readable work. Included are perspectives of how to help students make sense of the literacy code. (Author/SW)

A study compared the performance of 12 reading disabled and 15 normally achieving third grade students and 11 normally achieving first grade students on a variety of measures at different levels of language and reading in order to examine several macro models of reading disability--specifically, the general language, rule abstraction, and speed of…

Sixty children, 20 from each of grades 1, 3, and 5 served as subjects in a study that examined how elementary school age children realize the intent of directives embedded within written and picture book narratives. Directives were defined as the range of language forms used to direct actions (imperative statement, need/want statement, permission…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

Suggesting that perhaps teachers have been overlooking the role of drawing in children's communication development by concentrating on the verbal aspects of language, this paper discusses aspects of verbal and graphic language and looks at the interrelationships between these elements in the process of communication. Selected picture stories of a…