Purpose: Numerous studies emphasize the critical impact of early communicative interactions on children's language, cognitive, and social development; academic performance; and life outcomes. Early research linking disparities in language interaction quality and quantity to socioeconomic factors sometimes identified these population differences as…

Narrative is the art of conveying a sequence of causally and temporally linked events through monologic telling. Various functions can be served through narratives including sharing experiences, expressing ideas, providing entertainment, and imparting cultural or social values. Narrative language represents an authentic type of language that is…

Purpose: The purposes of this tutorial are (a) to describe a method of language sample analysis (LSA) referred to as SUGAR (Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised) and (b) to offer step-by-step instructions detailing how to collect, transcribe, analyze, and interpret the results of a SUGAR language sample. Method: The tutorial begins…

Research Findings: The present study investigates both the proximal processes and contextual influences on children's oral language development in preschool. We examine whether teacher language practices vary across activity settings and program type, which teacher language practices predict children's oral language skills, and potential…

Purpose: Developmental social-pragmatic and naturalistic behavioral interventions share a number of features, but they differ in their use of facilitative strategies and direct elicitation of child language. In this study, the authors investigated whether these approaches produce different language and social outcomes in young children with…

Naturalistic interventions show promise for improving language in children with autism. Specific interventions differ in direct elicitation of child language and indirect language stimulation, and thus may produce different language outcomes. This study compared the effects of responsive interaction, milieu teaching, and a combined intervention on…

This research aims to develop instruments to assess language development in under-3s and the adult interventions that support it. After an extensive literature search, observations were conducted in 17 groups of children spread over two day-care centres. In total 42 children were observed during a 30-minute slot and 25 adults during a half day.…

A classroom-oriented therapeutic program was devised for four pragmatically impaired preschoolers who showed little spontaneous language use within the classroom. Intervention strategies focused on facilitating interactions during free play and were based on four principles for practitioners: be child-oriented; engineer the environment; use…