In Study 1, children in grades 4-9 (N = 88, 29 females and 59 males) with persisting reading and/or writing disabilities, despite considerable prior specialized instruction in and out of school, were given an evidence-based comprehensive assessment battery at the university while parents completed questionnaires regarding past and current history…

This study examined the effect of participation in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program on the school readiness of children born to teenage mothers versus children born to traditional-age mothers participating in the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters program. A 45-item survey was collected from the…

We examined the impact of television viewing at ages 3 and 4 on vocabulary and at age 5 on executive functioning in the context of home learning environment and parental scaffolding. Children (N = 263) were seen in the lab when they were 3 years old and then again at ages 4 and 5. Parents completed measures assessing child television viewing and…

According to the big-fish-little-pond (BFLP) model, the self-concept is not only influenced in a positive way by one's own achievement, but also in a negative way by one's relative achievement in comparison with one's immediate peers. This study investigates whether the BFLP effect also holds for second language acquisition. A random sample of…

Many studies have pointed to impaired speech intelligibility in young people with Down's syndrome (DS). Some have attributed these problems to delayed phonological development, while others have identified disordered speech patterns, which could be related to a dyspraxic element in their speech. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to examine…

Children learning the inflections of their native language show the ability to generalize beyond the perceptual particulars of the examples they are exposed to. The phenomenon of "rule learning"--quick learning of abstract regularities from exposure to a limited set of stimuli--has become an important model system for understanding generalization…

Research linking loud sounds to hearing loss in youngsters is now widespread, resulting in the issuance of warnings to protect children's hearing. However, studies attesting to the adverse effects of intrusive sounds and noise on children's overall mental and physical health and well-being have not received similar attention. This, despite the…

Maternal vocal imitation of infant vocalizations is highly prevalent during face-to-face interactions of infants and their caregivers. Although maternal vocal imitation has been associated with later verbal development, its potentially reinforcing effect on infant vocalizations has not been explored experimentally. This study examined the…

Aim: To determine if the benefit of early confirmation of permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) on children's receptive language development is associated with fewer behavioural problems. Method: Follow-up of a total population cohort of 120 children with PCHI of moderate or greater severity (greater than or equal to 40 decibels relative…

Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus…

All theories of language development suggest that learning is constrained. However, theories differ on whether these constraints arise from language-specific processes or have domain-general origins such as the characteristics of human perception and information processing. The current experiments explored constraints on statistical learning of…

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been some cross-orthographic comparisons between alphabetic scripts and the hiragana syllabic script. One of the theoretical motives for these comparisons is the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to the size of the phonological unit mapped by the orthography, with phoneme…

The quantifier "dou" (roughly corresponding to English "all") in Mandarin Chinese has been the topic of much discussion in the theoretical literature. This study investigated children's knowledge of this quantifier using a new methodological technique, which we dubbed the Question-Statement Task. Three questions were addressed: (i) whether young…

This study tracked the order in which ten beginning spellers (M age = 5 ; 05; SD = 0.21 years) mastered the correct spellings of common inflectional suffixes in English. Spellings from children's journals from kindergarten and grade 1 were coded. An inflectional suffix was judged to be mastered when children spelled it accurately in 90 percent of…

Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit…