According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the development of proto-imperative and proto-declarative utterances in normally developing, non-neonatally screened, profoundly deaf toddlers. Method: Both types of proto-declarative are considered to be the most basic prelinguistic and early linguistic communicative functions.…

The grammar course objectives at Brigham Young University's English Language Center (ELC) are a list of grammar structures for each level that students are expected to be able to master. These objectives currently are only measured by pencil-paper grammar tests, providing information regarding receptive grammar ability only. Therefore, there is a…

How can language and literacy enhance emotional development in the very young (birth to three years)? Although all children begin to understand their world through language and social interaction, literacy differs from culture to culture. It can range from oral stories of personal and cultural relevance to songs of ethnic pride and includes a…

Twenty-six Head Start preschool classrooms participated in a yearlong intervention designed to link the Head Start Child Outcomes Framework with authentic assessment practices. Teachers in intervention and pilot classrooms implemented an assessment approach that incorporated the use of a curriculum-based assessment tool, the development of…

The Standards of Learning in this publication represent a major development in public education in Virginia. Adopted in February 2007 by the Virginia Board of Education, these standards emphasize the importance of foreign language instruction in the Commonwealth and, therefore, are an important part of Virginia's efforts to provide challenging…

The Standards of Learning in this publication represent a major development in public education in Virginia. Adopted in February 2007 by the Virginia Board of Education, these standards emphasize the importance of foreign language instruction in the Commonwealth and, therefore, are an important part of Virginia's efforts to provide challenging…

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…

The speech and language developmental progress of children with hearing loss educated using an Auditory-Verbal approach was compared to that of a control group of children with normal hearing. The experimental group consisted of 29 children ages 2-6 years with a mean pure tone average in the better ear of 76.17 dB HL at 0.5, 1 and 2 kHz. The 29…

School readiness tests are significant predictors of early school achievement. Measuring school readiness on a large scale would be necessary for the implementation of intervention programs at the community level. However, assessment of school readiness is costly and time consuming. This study assesses the predictive value of a school readiness…

To examine relationships between children's exposure to and use of new or rare words during preschool years and their later performance on vocabulary-related measures, this study explored frequencies of rare word use in different conversational settings. The study also tracked the use of rare words by mothers and children and related those results…

This critical review of the literature examines the characteristics and needs of limited English proficient (LEP) adults and the programs and services typically available to them. The complexities of the LEP population are explored first, including differences in education, English proficiency, labor market experience, and economic status.…

Defining metalinguistic awareness as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of language, this article examines the hypothesis that the metalinguistic demands of learning to read are shaped by the structure of a language and its associated writing system. The article examines the relationship between phonemic awareness and…

This paper examines the cognitive-linguistic development of young deaf children and some associated theories. The premise that linguistic processing begins initially and most effectively through visual linguistic processing within the context of the social environment is stressed. Social learning theories which emphasize the importance of the…

A study explored the functionalist-constructivist approach to acquisition of grammar where word classes emerge as a result of distributional differences related to function. Focus is on acquisition of two Swedish forms, "i" and "pa," which can belong to the categories of either particles or prepositions, in two Swedish…