This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11-4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether oral language skills moderate the effect of Korean phonological awareness (PA) on English PA for Korean preschoolers in the initial stage of learning English as a second language. The study participants comprised 81 five- to six-year-old Korean preschoolers attending Korean-medium preschools…

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

This study examined the relations between receptive language development and other developmental domains of preschoolers from low-income families, through an inter-cultural perspective involving the United States and Turkey. A total of 471 children and their caregivers participated in Turkey, while 287 participated in the United States. Children's…

Preschoolers' vocabulary acquisition sets the stage for later reading ability and school achievement. This study examined the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and the quality of the home environment of seventy-seven Chilean majority and Mapuche minority families from low and lower-middle-class backgrounds in explaining individual differences in…

In this study we evaluated the predictive validity of conceptual scoring. Two independent samples of Spanish-speaking language minority preschoolers (Sample 1: N = 96, mean age = 54.51 months, 54.3% male; Sample 2: N = 116, mean age = 60·70 months, 56.0% male) completed measures of receptive, expressive, and definitional vocabulary in their first…

This study examined (a) the relationship between gesture and speech produced by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children, and their mothers, during shared book-reading, and (b) the potential effectiveness of gestures accompanying maternal speech on the conversational responsiveness of children.…

This study investigated cross-linguistic influence in acquisition of a second lexicon, evaluating Samoan-English sequentially bilingual children (initial mean age 4 ; 9) during their first 18 months of school. Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary tasks evaluated acquisition of four word types: cognates, matched nouns, phrasal nouns and holonyms.…

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy…

Oral language skills in the preschool years are predictive of children's later reading success and literacy acquisition, and among these language skills, vocabulary and narrative ability play important roles. Children from low socioeconomic families face risks to their language development and because of threats to these skills it is important to…

This paper explores "fast mapping", one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained a just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing.…

Evaluates the effect of didactic techniques used during storybook reading on young children's acquisition of new vocabulary introduced in storybooks under three reading conditions: single-reading; repeated-reading and questioning. Findings suggest that didactic techniques used by adults have differential effects on preschoolers' receptive and…