The present study involved a systematic longitudinal analysis, with three points of assessment in the second year of life, of gestures/actions, word comprehension, and word production in a sample of very preterm infants compared to a sample of full-term infants. The relationships among these competencies as well as their predictive value on…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

Purpose: This review introduces emergentism, which is a leading theory of language development that states that language ability is the product of interactions between the child's language environment and his or her learning capabilities. The review suggests ways in which emergentism provides a theoretical rationale for interventions that are…

Joint attention (JA) skills are deficient in children with autism; however, children with autism seem to vary in the degree to which they display joint attention. Joint attention skills refer to verbal and nonverbal skills used to share experiences with others. They include gestures such as pointing, coordinated looks between objects and people,…

With an increasing number of young children participating in preschool education, this study determined whether peer effects are present in this earliest sector of schooling. Specifically, this work examined whether peer effects were influential to preschoolers' growth in language skills over an academic year and whether peer effects manifest…

Although not the focus of her article, phonological development in young children with speech sound disorders of various types is highly germane to Stoel-Gammon's discussion (this issue) for at least two primary reasons. Most obvious is that typical processes and milestones of phonological development are the standards and benchmarks against which…

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use…

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it…

Error patterns in children's phonological development are often described as simplifying processes that can interact with one another with different consequences. Some interactions limit the applicability of an error pattern, and others extend it to more words. Theories predict that error patterns interact to their full potential. While specific…

This study examines the beginning of the conceptual understanding of the first number-words and what role language can play in developing the notion of numbers. To that end, 2 1/2- and 3 1/2-year-old Basque and Spanish monolingual children's (N = 131) basic numeracy skills are analysed by means of two different experimental procedures: "Give-N"…

A questionnaire was used to document the attitudes of 63 classroom teachers in Ottawa, Canada, toward inclusive education for students with hearing loss. The objective was to determine whether teachers had the attitudes, knowledge, and teaching skills proposed to underlie the effective inclusion of these students in regular classrooms. It was…

Increasingly, mainstream teachers rather than specialist language teachers (English as a Second Language, bilingual teachers) are expected to work with English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms. This reality has drawn attention to the quality and content of the teacher preparation for this group of ELL teachers. Situated within this…

In this exploratory study of subtractive bilingualism in Spanish-English bilingual children, we present evidence that crosslinguistic influence has a selective effect on heritage first language loss. Differences in feature strength between English and Spanish in interrogative and negative polarity item (NPI) sentences seem to affect the…

This study describes the language environment of preschool programs serving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and examines relationships between child characteristics and an automated measure of adult and child language in the classroom. The Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system was used with 40 children with ASD to collect data…

We investigated written word identification of regular and irregular past-tense verb forms by first (L1) and second language (L2) learners of Dutch in third and sixth grade. Using a lexical decision task, we measured speed and accuracy in the identification of regular and irregular past-tense verb forms by children from Turkish-speaking homes (L2…