Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tonal languages, as CIs do not efficiently code pitch information. Mandarin is a tonal language with lexical tones and tonal processes such as neutral tone and tone sandhi, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations. Previous studies suggest that early…

We determined inter-rater agreement for the VB-MAPP, an instrument sometimes used in planning educational goals and evaluating intervention effects for young people with autism. A pair of raters independently rated each of 32 children diagnosed with autism. Intraclass correlation coefficients for the total Milestones and Barrier scores were 0.876…

Purpose: This experiment investigated the effects of a book-sharing intervention implemented in coparenting homes on the conversations of preschoolers with their parents. Method: A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to evaluate the effects of embedding decontextualized language utterances during book-sharing delivered by four…

This article presents the results of an action-research project. The project consisted of a reflection process involving a year-long collaboration between a teacher, a teaching assistant and a speech therapist in a special education school, together with two researchers acting as counsellors. The reflection process sought to promote changes in the…

Research has indicated that shared book reading that is characterized by interactive classroom discussion elicits relatively complex vocabulary and, consequently, contributes to children's vocabulary acquisition (Gonzalez et al. 2014). In addition, this type of book reading has also been found to be related to building listening, comprehension,…

Parents modulate their speech and their actions during infant-directed interactions, and these modulations facilitate infants' language and action learning, respectively. But do these behaviors and their benefits cross these modality boundaries? We investigated mothers' infant-directed speech and actions while they demonstrated the action-effects…

Purpose: This study was conducted in a large Midwestern metropolitan area to examine the language environments at home and in center-based childcare for young children who are living in poverty. We compared child language use and exposure in the home and childcare settings using extended observations with automated Language Environment Analysis to…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

This paper investigates elementary and secondary teachers' experiences of the impact, strength, and weaknesses of Social Network Sites (SNS) with regard to improving students' acquisition of Arabic Language. The study sample consisted of (85) Arabic language teachers; (77) of them responded to a questionnaire that measured their experiences of…

Background: We adopted a theoretical framework that the acquisition of a scientific concept comprises the development of connections among conceptual elements associated with a scientific term within a mental semantic network. Given this framework, the hypothesis that the surrounding words connected with a scientific term are relevant to the…

Human infants show a robust preference for speech over many other sounds, helping them learn language and interact with others. Lacking a preference for speech may underlie some language and social-pragmatic difficulties in children with ASD. But, it is unclear how an early speech preference supports later language and social-pragmatic abilities.…

Trajectories of expressive language development are highly heterogeneous in autism. Yoder et al. found that parental responsiveness, child response to joint attention, child communicative intent and consonant inventory were unique predictors of expressive language growth in minimally verbal preschoolers 16 months later (n = 87). This study applied…

Each infant is born with music potential, and early exposure to music and social music interactions may positively affect music development. Researchers have found that infants perceive music, attend to music, respond to music, and engage in social music interactions. Caregivers may enhance their music practices by deepening their infant music…

This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR…

Purpose: Toddlers with late language emergence have difficulty acquiring an object vocabulary that is well defined by shape early in development. Without object words, subsequent language growth is delayed. The current study tested an intervention scaffold that highlights object shape during word teaching so that toddlers with late language…