Purpose: Estimating the sequential associations between educators' and children's talk during language learning interactions requires careful consideration of factors that may impact measurement stability and resultant inferences. This research note will describe a preliminary study that used generalizability theory to understand the contribution…

This dissertation asks what young children do with style at a time when their social and linguistic worlds begin to expand beyond the home, into the peer group. Grounded in a yearlong ethnography of a preschool classroom in the San Francisco Bay Area, I show how play moved gradually from indoors to outdoors as children got older. This shift…

We utilized classroom video observations to examine the frequency and function of spontaneous communication in 112 preschool-3rd grade children with autism within 57 classrooms. Children initiated 7.53 instances (SD = 9.42) of spontaneous communication on average within a 12-minute sample, a rate of 0.69 initiations per minute. Autism features,…

Schools are the portal through which many children with autism spectrum disorder access early intervention. Collaborating with teachers can be an effective way to implement evidence-based practices. In this study, teachers learned to embed strategies from the Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation intervention into the standard…

Contemporary educational policies both at international and national levels acknowledge the educational rights of all children and their inclusion in mainstream educational practices. Like other children at risk, children with disabilities have opportunities to access mainstream education but their participation is not always realised in practice.…

Person-oriented approaches can be used to identify how teachers may draw upon a combination of strategies when interacting with individual children. For nearly 1 third of children under the age of 8 who come from a household where a language other than English is spoken, it is crucial to identify patterns of teachers' use of discourse strategies…

Although publicly-funded prekindergarten (pre-k) programs have been designed to promote children's school readiness, programs have tended to support early literacy skills to a greater degree than early language skills. Given the importance of both language and literacy skills for children's reading acquisition and academic achievement, the present…

This study examined repair strategies used by boys with language impairments, in response to clarification requests following conversational breakdowns. Five subjects, aged four-five, were compared with five age-matched controls and five controls matched for verbal competence. Results showed that all three groups overwhelmingly used revisions to…

This study examined the listener preparatory behaviors (LPBs) of selecting a listener, establishing listener proximity, and obtaining listener attention, as exhibited by 16 preschoolers with moderate to severe disabilities attending three different self-contained programs. It revealed that opportunities for children to display all three LPBs in…

Children with language delays often manifest low rates of self-initiated expressive language, particularly in school settings. Children with mild to moderate language delays appear to develop this pattern as a means of coping with situations in which they believe they are unable to perform or may perform poorly. Interactive language training…

This collection of four "focus flyers" developed by the Services for Children with Deaf-Blindness program at the University of Southern Mississippi provides practical guidelines for parents and teachers working with infants, children, and young adults who are deaf-blind. The first flyer is on communication interactions and is organized into an…

The study observed and compared the pragmatic skills of two mildly retarded and two nonhandicapped kindergarten children, focusing on their use of language in everyday conversational situations. A checklist developed by the investigator was used to record observations based on six categories of speech acts: commenting, answering, affirming,…

The conversations of 12 preschool stutterers with their mother, father, and a familiar peer were analyzed. Subjects' verbal interactive patterns did not really differ with various partners. Although some children were variable in fluency failures with different partners, the partner's verbal contribution was not associated with predictable changes…

Incorporated motivational procedures to teach question-asking to three children (ages three and five). All children learned to use questions in relation to items they had previously been unable to label and demonstrated generalization of spontaneous question-asking to new items and to their home environments with their mothers, with concomitant…

Analysis of videotapes of the signed communication (mostly Signed Exact English) of five preschool children with deafness in a special class found their communications brief and focused on the here-and-now. Topics of conversation were similar to those of nondisabled children. Child-initiated utterances were longer and more semantically diverse…