The parental report instrument is the most efficient developmental detection method and has shown high validity with professional assessment instruments. The reliability and validity of the Taiwan Birth Cohort Study (TBCS) 6-, 18- and 36-month scales have already been established. In this study, the reliability and validity of the 60-month scale…

This article addresses the impact of intensive, job-embedded mentor-coaching for 36 teachers and teaching assistants in relation to their language and literacy proficiency and the fidelity of their implementation of the Opening the World of Learning curriculum. The literacy scores for the majority of teachers in both the treatment and comparison…

The present article investigates the effects of individual and contextual variables on children's early learning in French nursery schools and German kindergartens. Our study of 552 children at preschools in France (299 children from French nursery schools) and Germany (253 children from German kindergartens) measured skills that facilitate the…

The study evaluates a social-communication-based approach to autism intervention aimed at improving the social interaction skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. We report preliminary results from an ongoing randomized controlled trial of 51 children aged 2 years 0 months to 4 years 11 months. Participants were assigned to either a…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

Much recent research has described the development of innovative functions of "like" as a discourse marker ("'Like' they're trying to be discreet about it") or discourse particle ("Maybe it's 'like' a girl thing") and as a quotative marker ("He's 'like' 'I don't want to work until later'"). Comparatively little is known about how speakers acquire…

The focus of the study was an interest in discerning the relationship between grammar knowledge and its application for evaluating grammar development at different academic and professional stages. A 3-part questionnaire was completed by first and last semester Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) graduate students, and practicing…

This study examined parents' and toddlers' talk and viewing behaviour while co-viewing an educational infant DVD focused on teaching language. Sixty-four 12- to 25-month-old infants viewed a DVD in a laboratory with their parents. A cluster analysis on parent talk revealed three groups: High, Moderate, and Low Teaching Focus parents. The High…

This study of incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading, involving 72 freshmen at two Asian universities, investigated (i) the effect of repeated encounters with target words on the development of seven aspects of word knowledge, and (ii) the effect of L1 lexicalization on the acquisition of meaning--does the absence of an L1 translation…

The purpose of this research is to study 5-6 years old preschool children's Turkish language skills related to various variables (socioeconomic status, profession of fathers, working of mothers, education levels of parents, numbers of siblings, age of children and gender of children) in Denizli. The sample of the research consisted of 223 (114…

Support for the use of local languages for learning and communication is currently in fashion among national policy-makers in Africa. This position has been promoted by UNESCO and other local-language advocates for years; more recently it is being seen favourably by a range of influential international institutions. However, even positive language…

Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of…

This article examines the role of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish vibrants. The data consist of 2 sets of recordings from 37 students enrolled in a Spanish pronunciation class. The statistical program VarbRul was used to analyze 7,597 samples. The vibration (simple or multiple) and the…

Fundamental learning abilities related to the implicit encoding of sequential structure have been postulated to underlie language acquisition and processing. However, there is very little direct evidence to date supporting such a link between implicit statistical learning and language. In three experiments using novel methods of assessing implicit…

We investigated correlates of language regression for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Using archival data, children diagnosed with ASD (N = 114, M age = 41.4 months) were divided into four groups based on language development (i.e., regression, plateau, general delay, no delay) and compared on developmental, adaptive…