President Obama has a cradle-to-career plan to reform the nation's schools. He also is calling on parents to take responsibility for their child's success. His vision includes the belief that all children can and will succeed, and that parents are the bridge to this success. Parents, guardians and caregivers can help children by connecting with…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on…

Adele Miccio recognized the paucity of information on the phonological development of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and emphasized the need to apply advances in bilingual phonological research toward an appropriate phonological measure for bilingual children. In the spirit of her pioneering work, the present study…

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making and progress monitoring for infants and toddlers. With increasing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education and intervention for all children, measurement plays an important role in documenting children's progress and outcomes of…

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan-Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish-Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite…

Data from the Cantonese Communicative Development Inventory (CCDI) is used to review the phonological preferences of younger (16-22 months) and older (23-30 month) groups of children in the lexical items they are reported to be able to say. Analogous results to those found for English emerge from the Cantonese data: the younger group display…

Briefly desctibes (1) the abstraction theory of word meaning acquisition and (2) three distinguishable versions of a conceptually based approach to the acquisition of word meaning. (JMB)

Discusses the acquisition of verb meaning based on the premise that there is a fundamental difference between the relational meanings expressed by verbs and the referential meanings expressed by simple nouns. (JMB)

Examination of pretest and posttest data as well as session data revealed a substantial increase in the number of multiword productions for most of the children in the experimental group (using vertical structures) but not for controls. (Author/CL)

Research on the environmental conditions promoting generative language learning is reviewed. Recombinative generalization is introduced as a principle of stimulus control that enables individuals to express and to comprehend novel utterances. Alternative matrix-training procedures should be considered in attempts to optimize the development of…

The paper describes 16 phonological processes which have been identified in the speech of both normal children and children with a deviant pattern of language development. (Author/SB)

The author provides an overview of language variation in humans and comments upon the emergence of the concept of metalinguistics (awareness of using language). She discusses the contribution of metalinguistics to work with dyslexic persons. (CL)

The language acquisition process in the hearing infant is reviewed and its potential as a model for an initial language program for the deaf child is considered. (Author)

Three- to 5-year olds heard two novel labels each applied to the same novel object. About half the children accepted both labels, thereby overriding mutual exclusivity. About half the children honored mutual exclusivity by accepting only one of the labels. (BC)