This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

The history of oral teacher preparation in America is both significant and diverse. There are numerous individuals and events that shifted and defined the professional practices of individuals who promote the listening and spoken language development of children with hearing loss. This article provides an overview of this rich history and offers a…

Age-normed tests of listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, and written expression were administered in Grades 1 (n = 128), 3, and 5, or 3 (n = 113), 5, and 7. Confirmatory factor analyses compared 1- and 4-factor models at each grade level and supported a 4-factor model of language by ear, mouth, eye, and hand. Multiple…

Effects of a 1-semester professional development (PD) intervention that included expert coaching with Head Start teachers were investigated in a randomized controlled trial with 88 teachers and 759 children. Differential effects of technologically mediated (remote) versus in-person (on-site) delivery of individualized coaching with teachers also…

There are gender differences in educational attainment amongst British children and there is evidence that these differences emerge early in life. In this study we investigate whether boys' and girls' early educational attainment levels are similarly related to disadvantage in the family environment. This study uses survey data from the Millennium…

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is an important second language teaching method. Planning is one of the significant factors in the studies of TBLT. This paper will mainly discuss the influence of planning on students' language performance in TBLT.

This study examined the effects that a multi-component intervention had on play behaviors and mean length of utterance (MLU) of eight Head Start children at risk for language delays and social skill development. The intervention consisted of three components: (a) a planning period included reading a story book that illustrated the play theme and…

This article is concerned with the sequence development in acquisition of negation by a Chinese speaker. Frequency analysis is given to show the development of each negative device in each period, and comparison is made with negation in the speech of the second-language learner and with that of first-language learner. Both similarities and…

This article examines children's role-play within the framework of language socialization, as well as the relations between (a) utterances made by young bilingual Korean children within the role-play frame and (b) metacommunicative utterances about the play. It analyzes the language features that children use to set up the context of role-play and…

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal examination of syntactic skills, starting at the age of emergence of simple sentences and continuing through the emergence of complex sentences. We ask whether there is systematic variability among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the early stages of sentence production. The…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

A pivotal period in the development of language occurs in the second year of life, when language comprehension undergoes rapid acceleration. However, the brain bases of these advances remain speculative as there is currently no functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from healthy, typically developing toddlers at this age. We…

Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar.…

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme.…

When can children speaking Japanese, English, or Chinese map and extend novel nouns and verbs? Across 6 studies, 3- and 5-year-old children in all 3 languages map and extend novel nouns more readily than novel verbs. This finding prevails even in languages like Chinese and Japanese that are assumed to be verb-friendly languages (e.g., T. Tardif,…