This study describes the results of an evaluation of the Individualized Learning Intervention, a mentoring program for early childhood educators. This mentoring program includes 3 components: Mentor Teacher Seminar, Mentor teachers supporting professional development of Protege teachers throughout the school year, and Mentor coordinator meetings…

This article addresses the question of what language proficiency (LP) is, both theoretically and empirically. It does so by making a distinction, on one hand, between "basic" and "higher language cognition" and, on the other hand, between "core" and "peripheral components" of LP. The article furthermore critically examines the notion of "level" in…

Learning to communicate using speech and language is a primary developmental task for young children. Delays in the acquisition of language are one of the earliest indicators of developmental deficits that may affect academic and social outcomes for individuals across the life span. In the period since the passage of PL 99-457, significant…

Purpose: This study examined syntactic development in a large cohort of adolescents. At kindergarten, each participant had been identified as having specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), or typical language development (TLD). Method: The participants (n = 444) had a mean age of 13;11 (years;months; range =…

Recent developments in theories of language (grammars) seem to share a number of tenets which mark a drastic shift from traditional disentangled descriptions of language: emphasis on a big number of discrete grammatical rules or a corpus of structure patterns has given way to a more unitary, explanatory powerful description of language informed by…

Across the world, technology is part of the social and academic lives of students. In particular, iPods are one of the most popular forms of technology. Wikipedia, an excellent online source for information, notes that Apple has sold more than 119 million of these portable media players as of October 2007. With iPods, students can listen to, or…

This article presents the authors' comments on Nina Hyams' article, "The Acquisition of Inflection: A Parameter Setting Approach" (AIPSA). The article began as a 1986 presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Parts of it were also presented at the 4th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL) in 1987…

Purpose: This study examined children's word learning in limited and extended high-frequency bandwidth conditions. These conditions represent typical listening environments for children with hearing loss (HL) and children with normal hearing (NH), respectively. Method: Thirty-six children with NH and 14 children with moderate-to-severe HL served…

The effects of age of acquisition and repetition priming on picture naming latencies and errors were studied in 22 children who stutter (CWS) and 22 children who do not stutter (CWNS) between the ages of 3;1 and 5;7. Children participated in a computerized picture naming task where they named pictures of both early and late acquired (AoA) words in…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Two experiments examined the time course of lexical information availability in 20 adults, 20 children (8;0-10;0) with typical language development, and in 20 children (8;0-10;0) with specific language impairment. A cross-modal picture-word interference paradigm was used in which participants named the pictures as quickly as possible while…

Delays in the onset of canonical babbling with hearing loss are extensively documented. Relatively little is known about other aspects of prelinguistic vocal development and hearing loss. Eight infants with typical hearing and eight with severe-to-profound hearing loss were matched with regard to a significant vocal development milestone, the…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…

Evidence strongly supports shared book-reading (SBR) as an opportune intervention for developing early literacy and language development in at-risk preschool-aged children. Many teachers of high-risk preschoolers, however, lack the instructional skills and evidence-based strategies essential for the most effective storybook experience.…

The relation of social and linguistic input measures to early vocabulary development was examined in 30 low-income African American mother-infant pairs. Observations were conducted when the child was 0 years, 1 month (0;1), 0;4, 0;8, 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Maternal input was coded for word types and tokens, contingent responsiveness, and…