Purpose: To examine patterns of sensory responsiveness (i.e., hyperresponsiveness, hyporesponsiveness, and sensory seeking) as factors that may account for variability in social-communicative symptoms of autism and variability in language, social, and communication skill development in children with autism or other developmental disabilities…

The transformations that have taken place in the French "ecole maternelle" (nursery school) over the last 30 years may be characterised by a dual dynamic, internal and external, of scholarisation. Firstly, the analysis of its changing position with regard to primary school and within early childhood education and care shows a relative…

Purpose: To review research addressing the relationship of working memory (WM) to language development and academic functioning and to consider the role of the speech-language pathologist (SLP) in assessment and intervention of WM difficulties in school-age children. Method: Aspects of WM critical to language acquisition and academic success are…

The question as to how action research (AR) is related to cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is not answerable in categorical terms. Both CHAT and AR have been variously interpreted and much depends on the individual biographies of those who pronounce on their relationship. The aim of this paper is to show how action research, conducted…

This article offers a critical examination of aspects of a practice- and theory-developing intervention in the teacher education setting in England designed as a variation of Developmental Work Research. A positive case is argued for the distinctiveness of such cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT-) informed interventions and some points of…

Naturalistic interventions show promise for improving language in children with autism. Specific interventions differ in direct elicitation of child language and indirect language stimulation, and thus may produce different language outcomes. This study compared the effects of responsive interaction, milieu teaching, and a combined intervention on…

There are few long-term follow-up studies of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) who attended intensive intervention programmes in their pre-school years. Thirty-six children with ASD enrolled in relatively intensive, specialist pre-school programmes (minimum of 15 h intervention per week for 2 years at a mean age of 3.4 years) were…

This article describes a method for identifying test items as disability neutral for children with vision and motor disabilities. Graduate students rated 130 items of the Preschool Language Scale and obtained inter-rater correlation coefficients of 0.58 for ratings of items as disability neutral for children with vision disability, and 0.77 for…

Prenatal alcohol exposure can result in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), which can include physical and neurobehavioral disorders, including cognitive, social, language, and motor impairments that can persist throughout life. In order for children with FASD to receive the full benefit of services, recognition of their disability needs to…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

This study investigates the construct of Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) in a group of preservice mainstream K-12 teachers who are developing skills to work with English Language Learners (ELLs) in United States (US) public school contexts. Specifically, the study seeks to explore how preservice teachers' participation in directed university…

Prior research has established an executive function advantage among bilinguals as compared to monolingual peers. These non-linguistic cognitive advantages are largely assumed to result from the experience of managing two linguistic systems. However, the possibility remains that the relationship between bilingualism and executive function is…

This dissertation investigates the relation between prosodic events at the phrasal level and component events at the rhythmic level. The overarching hypothesis is that the interaction among component rhythmic events gives rise to prosodic patterns at the phrasal level, while at the same time being constrained by the latter, and that in the case of…

Previous investigators have found significant relations between children's early spontaneous gesture and their subsequent vocabulary development: the more gesture children produce early, the larger their later vocabularies. The questions we address here are (1) whether we can increase children's gesturing through experimental manipulation and, if…

Many children find school tests difficult, but children who are deaf or hard of hearing may find them especially so. Reports from the 2008 Test Equity Summit indicate that disproportionate numbers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing at all grade levels are failing critically important tests even though their classroom work may show that…