Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…

Socioeconomic disparities in early language are widespread and have long-lasting effects. The aim of this study is to investigate when social gaps in language problems arise and how they change across the first years of schooling. We address this question in two large longitudinal Norwegian datasets: the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental…

The present contribution aims at presenting an assessment tool (i.e., the TALK-assessment) built to evaluate the language development and school readiness of Italian preschoolers before they enter primary school, and its predictive validity for the children's reading and writing skills at the end of the first year of primary school. The early…

The Matthew effects suggest that children who struggle when learning to read are less likely to read for pleasure later in life compared to children who ease into reading quickly. One aspect of early literacy instruction that might hamper reading progress is learning to read simultaneously in two languages. Despite the long-lasting and widespread…

This study identified patterns of classroom and family experiences and developmental outcomes for young children in segregated early education. This study is based on data from a high-quality early education program serving young children from low-income households in 19 schools across the U.S. The sample included 1,521 children during the…

Language and literacy skills are critical for academic success. Shared book reading is an evidence-based practice for improving a range of language and literacy skills in young children, including those with or at risk for learning disabilities. This article describes how teachers and speech-language pathologists (SLP) can collaborate to support…

This article explores the available research literature on language development and language interventions among deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) children. This literature is divided into two broad categories: Research on natural languages (specifically American Sign Language and spoken English) and research on communication systems (specifically…

This study deals with the experience of prospective teachers of Turkish in creating activities by using strategies suitable for verbal communication skills and designing an assessment tool to evaluate such activities. The aim of this study is to provide the participants with the necessary knowledge about activity designing strategies as well as to…

Purpose: This study reexamines the claim that difficulty forming memories of words comprising uncommon sound sequences (i.e., low phonological neighborhood density words) is a determinant of delayed expressive vocabulary development (e.g., Stokes, 2014). Method: We modeled communicative development inventory data from (N = 442) 18-month-old…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

The present study examines the perceptual, linguistic, and social cues that were associated with preschoolers' (4;11) growth in word-learning during shared book-reading and guided play activities. Small groups of three preschoolers (n = 30) and one adult were video-recorded during an intervention study in which new vocabulary words were explicitly…

Purpose: There are strong retention benefits when learners frequently test themselves during the learning period. This practice of repeated retrieval has recently been applied successfully to children's word learning. In this study, we apply a repeated retrieval procedure to the learning of novel adjectives by preschool-age children with…

Despite rapidly growing research on parental influences on children's executive function (EF), the uniqueness and specificity of parental predictors and links between adult EF and parenting remain unexamined. This 13-month longitudinal study of 117 parent-child dyads (60 boys; M[subscript age] at Time 1 = 3.94 years, SD = 0.53) included detailed…

We examined if and when English-learning 17-month-olds would accommodate Japanese forms as labels for novel objects. In Experiment 1, infants (n = 22) who were habituated to Japanese word-object pairs looked longer at switched test pairs than familiar test pairs, suggesting that they had mapped Japanese word forms to objects. In Experiments 2 (n =…

Previous studies reveal an association between particular features of parental language input and advances in children's language learning. However, it is not known whether parent coaching aimed to enhance specific input components would (a) successfully increase these components in parents' language input and (b) result in concurrent increases in…