Research has shown how cochlear implants (CIs), in children with hearing impairments, have improved speech perception and production, but very little is known about the children's pragmatic language development. During a 4-year longitudinal study of three children with CIs, certain aspects of pragmatic language development were observed in free…

This study took place at the University of Wyoming, located in the rural mountain West. The University of Wyoming, with approximately 13,000 students, is the only four-year university in the state. The teacher education population of the College of Education is about 600, and demographically, this population is about 90% White, predominately…

This study focused on the role of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education in the development of lexical knowledge in Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among second-generation Russian-Hebrew speaking immigrants in Israel. The study was designed as a longitudinal and comparative study. The lexical knowledge of children was measured three times…

As English increasingly becomes the international language, many ministerial and educational organisations have identified the need to improve the competence of Thai students in speaking English. While there is significant research devoted to developing software tools to support the teaching of English as a second language, they are mostly…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), "comprehensible input" (Krashen, 1985) has been considered a critical factor to help learners acquire foreign and second languages (L2). From this perspective, the notion of extensive or free voluntary reading (Day & Bamford, 1998; Krashen, 1993) has emerged that L2 learners should be given more…

The goal of the present study was to compare the conversational language skills and interactions of four children who are d/hh and who received cochlear implants (CI) prior to the age of four years with four typically hearing peers matched for age, gender, teacher perceived language ability and race. This exploratory, descriptive study was…

The role of interactional feedback has been a critical area of second language acquisition (SLA) research for decades and while findings suggest interactional feedback can facilitate SLA, the extent of its influence can vary depending on a number of factors, including the native language of those involved in communication. Although studies have…

Research on the impact of the Project Approach on young children with disabilities or children who are at-risk is limited. Mixed methods were used to study the impact of the Project Approach on the social interactions, challenging behaviors, and language development of eight focal children in two inclusive classrooms. Child participants were two…

Several research groups have previously constructed short forms of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) for different languages. We consider the specific aim of constructing such a short form to be used for language screening in a specific age group. We present a novel strategy for the construction, which is applicable…

This study examines the impact of 2 forms of professional development on prekindergarten teachers' early language and literacy practice: coursework and coaching. Participating teachers (N = 148) from 6 urban cities were randomly assigned to Group 1 (coursework), Group 2 (on-site coaching), or Group 3 (control group). Pre- and postassessments…

Purpose: Facilitating language development in children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are learning African American English (AAE) as their first dialect requires clinicians to consider grammatical, lexical, and cultural differences. The purpose of this article is to examine 2 intervention methods that have an extensive history of…

Measures of productivity and sentence organization are useful metrics for quantifying language development and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual children. It is not yet known what measures within and across languages are most informative when evaluating the language skills of bilingual children. The purpose of this study was to…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to evaluate the clinical utility of a verbal working memory measure, specifically, a nonword repetition task, with a sample of Spanish-English bilingual children and (2) to determine the extent to which individual differences in relative language skills and language use had an effect on the clinical…

This study examined the existence of an object omission stage and the interaction between object omissions and substitution errors in the early stages of the development of Spanish syntax. One hundred and three Spanish-speaking children from Colombia completed an elicitation task evaluating the production of direct object pronouns. Results…