Research Findings: This study examined the association between preschool children's social-emotional competence (SEC), defined by their social skills and problem behaviors, and numeracy skills. It also examined if any subdomains of SEC predicted preschool numeracy above and beyond latent social skills or problem behaviors variables. Data came from…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate persistence in preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to similar-age peers with typical language (TL) on tasks designed to be moderately challenging, yet equivalent in difficulty for both groups. Method: Sixteen preschool-age children with DLD were matched to 16…

Background: Within cohorts of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) there is considerable variation in terms of language ability. In the past, it was believed that children with ASD either had delayed articulation and phonology skills or excelled in those areas compared to other language domains. Very little is known about speech sound…

Income-based childcare programs provide children access to developmentally appropriate and vocabulary-rich literacy experiences. For this study, participating U.S. Head Start Centers requested families complete a weekly home literacy log to encourage vocabulary-rich shared book reading activities in the home. Using participant characteristics,…

The perspective of emergent literacy was applied to investigate the name-writing skills of 4-year-old, low-income Mandarin Chinese-speaking children in Taiwan. One hundred and eleven children in Taiwan were recruited from 12 public preschools. Children were individually assessed with a name-writing task, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine potential mediators of the relationship between developmental language disorder (DLD) status and executive function performance. Method: Participants included preschoolers, of whom 80 met the diagnostic criteria for DLD and 103 were categorized as having typical language abilities. Participants'…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show evidence of domain-general deficits in sequentially patterned motor skills. This study focuses on the production of rhythmically grouped sequences drawn from a music task, with the hypothesis that children with DLD will show a sequential pattern learning deficit that crosses…

Research Findings: This study extends the understanding of the sibling effect on children's theory of mind (ToM) among Chinese preschoolers by adopting an ecological perspective. The participants were 225 Chinese preschoolers, comprising 100 children with siblings (M[subscript age] = 4.54 years, SD = 1.11, 55 boys) and 125 children without…

Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

Purpose: Sign language, like spoken language, incorporates phonological and articulatory (or motor) processing components. Thus, the learning of novel signs, like novel spoken word forms, may be problematic for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In the present work, we hypothesize that phonological and articulatory deficits in…

The current study examined the contexts in which a preschool teacher professional development intervention was more versus less effective in improving student outcomes. We used a fixed intercept, random coefficient (FIRC) modeling approach to explore the contextual characteristics inside and outside school walls that predicted differential…

Background and Aims: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) benefit from word learning procedures that include a mix of immediate retrieval and spaced retrieval trials. In this study, we examine the relative contribution of these two types of retrieval. Methods: We examine data from Haebig et al. (2019) in their study that compared an…

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a dialogic reading picture book intervention on preschoolers' repeating patterning ability. Ninety-four children age 4 years 1 month to 6 years 8 months (M[subscript age] = 5 years 0 months) were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 46) or active control (n = 48) conditions. Well-trained university and…

The early childhood years are critical for developing executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Prior literature suggests a robust relationship between EF and ToM; however, this relationship has seldom been investigated in children living in poverty. In addition, few studies have employed comprehensive ToM measures to explore how EF…

This study compared preschool spoken language outcomes for children with hearing loss who met the Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) guidelines to those who did not, as well as compared outcomes for those who met the current EHDI guidelines to those who met the earlier benchmarks. Finally, the predictive role of meeting each component…