Public libraries are a national reading service, supporting reading and literacy throughout life. As a free local resource, they are particularly powerful in supporting the development of literacy and reading skills in disadvantaged communities. Libraries have a unique and powerful role to play in raising literacy skills, vital for individuals and…

"Early Childhood Development" celebrates the rich diversity of development among children in all neighborhoods in the United States and around the globe. It examines the physical, social, emotional, linguistic and intellectual characteristics of children from birth through age 8. Within each development domain, it considers the typical…

The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program is the U.S. Department of State's flagship undergraduate study abroad scholarship program designed for high-achieving American undergraduate students of limited financial means (Pell Grant recipients). The Institute of International Education (IIE) has supported its implementation since the…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…

English learners (ELs) are one of America's fastest-growing student groups, and their numbers are most concentrated in the country's Great Cities. In addition, the academic needs of these school children are complex and varied, especially as they are developing knowledge of multiple language systems. This document is continued evidence of how…

As children of immigrants are increasing in number across the U.S. classrooms, schools need to develop strategies to engage with immigrant families. Structural and attitudinal issues in the school system create challenges in communicating with immigrant parents. Immigrant parents have high expectations for their children's academic achievement…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

Purpose: This study investigated component skills in oral language development utilizing and validating a new assessment battery in a large (N = 800) and representative sample of Greek students 4-7 years of age. Method: All participants enrolled in public schools from four geographical regions (Attica, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Crete) that varied…

Given the controversies surrounding the critical period hypothesis on second-language (L2) learning outcomes, this study focuses on the phonological aspect of language acquisition--the strength of the foreign accent in L2. Drawing on data from a large-scale representative data set on immigrant adolescents in Germany--CILS4EU-DE--we first…

The validity of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System was evaluated for Dutch. 216 5-min samples (six samples per age per child) were selected from daylong recordings at 5, 10 and 14 months of age of native Dutch-speaking younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (N=6) and of typically developing children (N=6). Two…

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a…

Infants attune to their native language during the first two years of life, as attested by decreases in the processing of nonnative phonological sounds and reductions in the range of possible sounds accepted as labels for native words. The present study shows that French-learning infants aged 1;8 can learn new words in an unfamiliar language,…

Linguistic expressions of locative spatial relations in sign languages are mostly visually motivated representations of space involving mapping of entities and spatial relations between them onto the hands and the signing space. These are also morphologically complex forms. It is debated whether modality-specific aspects of spatial expressions…

While Canada's multiculturalism and bilingual education represent an opportunity for educational sectors to foster students' intercultural citizenship, in New Brunswick -- Canada's only officially bilingual province -- provincial language ideological debates (LIDs) may create structures impeding Anglophone French immersion (FI) students'…