The purpose of this teacher inquiry is to explore the effects of signing and gesturing on the expressive language development of non-verbal children. The first phase of my inquiry begins with the observations of several non-verbal students with various etiologies in three different educational settings. The focus of these observations is to…

This study investigated how frequency influenced acquisition of L2 English infinitive and gerund complements among L1 Thai learners. Participants were separated into low and high proficiency groups based on their CU-TEP scores. Each group consisted of 30 participants. Data were collected using the Word Selection Task (WST) and the Grammaticality…

This study explored school-based speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') use of iPads and apps for speech and language instruction, specifically for articulation, language, and vocabulary goals. A mostly quantitative-based survey was administered to approximately 2,800 SLPs in a K-12 setting; the final sample consisted of 189 licensed SLPs. Overall,…

Since the NC Pre-K (More at Four) Program began in 2001-2002, a variety of statewide evaluation studies have been conducted by the FPG Child Development Institute. These annual evaluations have included several studies of program services, classroom quality, and children's outcomes during pre-k as well as longer-term into kindergarten and third…

This study measured naturalistic language stimulation in Hong Kong among eight bilingual (Cantonese, English) infants. Two findings were that (a) infants received more indirect (adult-to-adult) than direct (adult-to-infant) language stimulation and (b) infants received 6.8 [hours] of language stimulation per day with more fillers, vocatives, and…

Children growing up bilingual face a unique linguistic environment. The current study investigated whether early bilingual experience influences the developmental trajectory of associative word learning, a foundational mechanism for lexical acquisition. Monolingual and bilingual infants (N = 98) were tested on their ability to learn…

Some of recently proposed phonotactic learners are tier-based bigram learners that restrict their hypothesis space to patterns between two segments that are adjacent at the tier level. This assumption is understandable considering that typologically frequent nonadjacent sound patterns are predominantly those that hold between two tier-adjacent…

Infants' early communicative repertoires include both words and symbolic gestures. The current study examined the extent to which infants organize words and gestures in a single unified lexicon. As a window into lexical organization, eighteen-month-olds' ("N" = 32) avoidance of word-gesture overlap was examined and compared with…

We examined the extent to which word characteristics (i.e., differences in orthographic transparency among words) and child characteristics (i.e., emergent literacy skills) explain variation in children's spelling, using data from young Korean children (N = 168). We compared predicted probabilities of various types of words (e.g., transparent vs.…

Is the right to sign language only the right to a minority language? Holding a capability (not a disability) approach, and building on the psycholinguistic literature on sign language acquisition, I make the point that this right is of a stronger nature, since only sign languages can guarantee that each deaf child will properly develop the…

Purpose: This study examines the influence of word frequency, phonological neighborhood density (PND), age of acquisition (AoA), and phonotactic probability on production variability and accuracy of known words by toddlers with no history of speech, hearing, or language disorders. Method: Fifteen toddlers between 2;0 (years;months) and 2;5…

Purpose: Considerable research has investigated the role of verbal working memory in language development in children with and without language problems. Much less is currently known about the relationship between language and the declarative and procedural memory systems. This study examined whether these 2 memory systems were related to…

Purpose: The relatedness of tense morphemes in the language of children younger than 3 years of age is a matter of controversy. Generativist accounts predict that the morphemes will be related, whereas usage-based accounts predict the absence of relationships. This study focused on the increasing productivity of the 5 morphemes in the tense…

This article is based on the results gained from the research about the perception teachers have about stories. The study was conducted in Sweden and the main purpose was to partially fulfil the requirements for Erasmus Mundus joint degree "International Master of Early Childhood Education and Care". In accordance with previous research…

Substantial amount of research regarding L2 learners' beliefs has been conducted in recent years. However, not enough attention has been paid to investigating the nature of learners' beliefs; hence our understanding of the construct is contradictory in the sense that early research studies report stability in beliefs, while more recent studies…