Discusses the role of language development in educational achievement and the implications of this role for curriculum development. Children's preschool knowledge of language and its development in early school years is discussed. How their language experiences in school might enhance their language development also is outlined. Highlighted are…

The research articles in this special issue are authored by scholars who share as their common concern the ways in which technologies can best be used to support the acquisition of additional languages. Taken as a whole, the overall agenda of these studies is to capture what happens when language teachers and learners use technologies as part of…

A questionnaire on their child's musical involvement and appreciation was completed by parents of 65 children who use cochlear implants. Findings indicated many of these children were involved in some type of formal or informal musical activity and few accommodations were provided in formal music classes. Correlations between speech measures and…

Analyzes the role played by oral language skills and by metalinguistic capacities in the reading performance of young beginner readers in French as a second language who are in a situation of successive bilingualism and observing whether differences exist between them and their francophone peers of the same age. (Author/VWL)

Two boys, ages 7 and 9, with severe developmental disabilities were taught to use requests conditionally (when desired items were proximally distant) to obtain desired snack items. Results suggest that the conditioned discriminations were established quickly and both learners generalized their conditional discriminations to other contexts.…

French-speaking children and adults heard silent comic-strip stories that differed by frame display mode, explicitness of the links between depicted events, and whether the topic changed on the last frame. Subjects' use of referents for the last frame indicated that manipulation of context was a good means of assessing speakers' acquisition of…

Suggests that children construe the world as they develop relationships with other individuals. Offers considerations regarding developmental changes marking the first year of life and argues that cognition is framed in public social exchanges and private dialogical thinking. (DLH)

This article introduces a clinical forum that considers a variety of theoretical and analytical frameworks that have been applied to developing systems in phonological theory and treatment. It explains phonological theory, in which sound properties that are marked in language are those sounds that are most complex. (Contains references.)…

Previous work by our group has shown that infant emotional vitality (EV), the lively expression of shared emotion both positive and negative, predicts cognitive and language abilities in toddlerhood. Specifically, infants who demonstrated a pattern of high emotional expression combined with high bids to their caregivers, fared significantly better…

The case study describes the application of Bakhtin's theories of dialogism to the language learning of one child. The author traces the development of her son's language development from age 2 and 9 months through the age of 5 and 6 months. The findings focus on the ways in which the preschooler appropriated language from books, his parent's…

This case study describes Jason, a child with an autism spectrum disorder and hyperlexia. Hyperlexia is a condition characterized by precocious single-word recognition skills and weaker comprehension skills. Jason demonstrated advanced writing skills and a strong general preference for learning materials presented visually rather than orally. His…

The inquiry science process provides a perfect opportunity for students to practice relational meaning in language. As students design their experiments, negotiate their ideas with peers, and share their data and conclusions, they sharpen both their reading and written communication skills. This process needs to be mediated by having the teacher…

The "sociocultural framework" highlights the contributions of children's cultural and linguistic contexts to early language and literacy development. To collaborate with parents in early intervention programs, including speech-language therapy, there must be a sincere commitment to the development of cultural competence. Hispanics are…

A multiple baseline design across three parent-child dyads of families with multiple risk factors was used to determine the effectiveness of teaching parents to use milieu language teaching procedures. Parents were taught to use two sets of milieu language teaching skills: responsive interaction and incidental teaching. Results showed that parents…

Cocaine use during pregnancy is a high-risk indicator for adverse developmental outcomes. Three levels of intervention (center, home, and primary care) were compared in a full service, birth to age 3, early intervention program serving children exposed to cocaine prenatally. Data were collected on 130 children from urban, predominantly poor,…