This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking…

The study examined the longitudinal association of parental involvement in Head Start parent-focused programs, parenting behaviors, and the cognitive development of children by specifying two longitudinal growth models. Model 1 examined the longitudinal effects of the parental involvement in three Head Start parenting programs (parenting classes,…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to investigate how neighborhoods and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage impact school readiness over time. School readiness was measured using the Early Development Instrument (EDI) for 3 populations of kindergartners in 2001, 2003, and 2005 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. EDI results…

Most educators are familiar with Lev Vygotsky's concept of the "zone of proximal development," yet the bulk of Vygotsky's pioneering theory of cognitive development largely remains unknown. This volume provides a systematic, authoritative overview of Vygotsky's work and its implications for educational research and practice. Major topics include…

A major focus of research on language acquisition in infancy involves experimental studies of the infant's ability to discriminate various kinds of speech or speech-like stimuli. This research has demonstrated that infants are sensitive to many fine-grained differences in the acoustic properties of speech utterance. Furthermore, these empirical…

Background: Specific language impairment has previously solely been documented for children acquiring spoken languages, despite informal reports of deaf children with possible sign language disorder. The paper reports the case of a deaf child exposed to British Sign Language (BSL) from birth, who has significant developmental deficits in the…

Most children between 18 and 24 months can say about 50 words and understand hundreds more. While children a few months younger use single words to label objects and people, the one- and two-word phrases children use at this age show the beginnings of what they call "stories"--children's expressions of their desires, descriptions of what they see,…

This study examined the factor structure of a Korean version of the Perceptual Learning Styles Preference Questionnaire. The instrument was developed to measure the learning-style preferences of students of English as a second language and English as a foreign language and has gained wide currency as a classroom diagnostic tool and survey…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on the early lexical performance of African American children. Method: Thirty African American toddlers (30 to 40 months old) from low-SES (n = 15) and middle-SES (n = 15) backgrounds participated in the study. Their lexical-semantic performance was examined on 2 norm-referenced…

Bilingualism is often considered an inappropriate developmental choice for children with specific language impairment (SLI) because, according to a widespread belief, these children's limited capacity for language would be overtaxed by learning two linguistic systems. However, there has not been adequate empirical investigation of SLI in bilingual…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

This study examines infants' joint attention behavior and language development in a rural village in Nigeria. Participants included eight younger (1;0 to 1;5, M age=1;2) and eight older toddlers (1;7 to 2;7, M age=2;1). Joint attention behaviors in social interaction contexts were recorded and coded at two time points six months apart. Analyses…

Correction and repair as components of an instructional practice that facilitates learning have figured prominently in research on classroom-based second and foreign language learning. Recent studies incorporating a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) have also focused on repair and correction. From a CA…

The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the "Structure-Building Model" and the "Continuity Hypothesis" within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain…