Purpose: Over the last 2 decades, research on statistical learning has demonstrated its importance in supporting language development. Notably, most of the research to date has focused on monolingual populations (or has not reported the language background of participants). Several recent studies, however, have begun to focus on the impact of…

Purpose: Better auditory prostheses and earlier interventions have led to remarkable improvements in spoken language abilities for children with hearing loss (HL), but these children often still struggle academically. This study tested a hypothesis for why this may be, proposing that the language of school becomes increasingly disconnected from…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how learning to read can be thought of as learning statistical regularities and to demonstrate why this is relevant for theory, modeling, and practice. This tutorial also shows how triangulation of methods and cross-linguistic research can be used to gain insight. Method: The impossibility of…

Purpose: In typical development, distributional cues--patterns in input--are related to language acquisition processes. Statistical and implicit learning refer to the utilization of such cues. In children with intellectual disability, much less is known about the extent to which distributional cues are harnessed in mechanisms of language learning.…

Purpose: The current study was designed to (a) describe average hourly Language Environment Analysis (LENA) data for preschool-age Spanish--English bilinguals (SEBs) and typically developing monolingual peers and (b) compare LENA data with mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and total number of words (TNW) calculated on a selected sample of…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to compare the rates of using African American English (AAE) grammatical features in spoken and written language at different points in literacy development. Based on Kroll's model (1981), a high degree of similarity in use between the modalities was expected at Grade 3, and lower similarity was…

Purpose: There is a paucity of information detailing the phonological skills of Spanish-English bilingual children and comparing that information to information concerning the phonological skills of predominantly English-speaking (PE) and predominantly Spanish-speaking (PS) children. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship…

Fourteen mothers of language delayed two- to five-year-old children provided shorter utterances, fewer questions, more directions, and fewer acceptance utterances than 14 mothers of nondelayed children in free play and structured situations. (CL)

Language samples were elicited from seven children (4 to 9 years old) with language disorders in three different stimulus conditions. (SBH)

Purpose: The variable deletion of word-final consonants is a well-known feature of African American English (AAE). This study aimed to show whether African American children exhibit an alveolar bias in their deletion of final voiceless stops as has been observed for their production of final nasals. Method: The data were extracted from more than…

The number of negative responses obtained in two language sampling conditions (parallel talk with negative constructions and parallel talk with affirmative constructions) was compared for studies of 18 normal kindegarten children. (Author/CL)

In a case study of a 4-year-old girl whose substitution patterns were affected by constraints of individual words, initial assessment revealed she correctly articulated few consonant sounds. (Author/PHR)

A study investigated phonological patterns in 12 bilingual (Spanish-English) 4-year-old children. There were no significant differences between the two languages on percentage of occurrence for phonological processes, however, children exhibited different patterns of production across the two languages and showed different patterns compared to…