The purpose of the present study was to examine the developmental outcomes of children 7 years after their initial diagnosis. Children diagnosed with autism or PDD-NOS at age 2 received follow-up evaluations at age 9. Diagnostic stability was high, with 88 percent of the sample obtaining autism spectrum diagnoses at age 9. Cognitive scores…

Maternal ratings of self-efficacy and involvement in early intervention were compared across two groups of mothers with young children with Prelingual deafness: 24 mothers of children with hearing aids and 30 mothers of children with a cochlear implant. Although mothers of children with cochlear implants rated their child's early intervention…

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words,…

This report summarizes findings from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development as effect sizes for exclusive maternal care and--for children in child care--type, quality, and quantity of care. Children (n = 1,261) were recruited at birth and assessed at 15, 24, 36, and 54 months.…

Drash and Tudor's argument that autism is a contingency-shaped disorder of verbal behavior is logical and consistent with behavioral principles, but the argument's premises have no direct empirical support and some conflicting evidence. The quantity and quality of research needed to support such a theory is compared to that found in the area of…

Williams syndrome (WS) is often cited as the prime example within developmental disorders of the dissociation of language from other cognitive skills, particularly from visuo-motor skills. This claim has been responsible for the challenges posed by this population to cognitive theories and to models of language acquisition. Two Hebrew-speaking…

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6;8, 8;6 and 10;10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and…

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more…

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) effectively prepares new teachers to meet the needs of language minority students in California. Specifically, the authors studied the extent to which the program prepares students to meet the criteria of the Crosscultural Language and…

Although child maltreatment has often been described as leading to language deficits, the few well-controlled investigations of language acquisition in maltreated children have focused on language content rather than form, or have used qualitative rather than quantitative measures. This study examines syntactic complexity in 19 maltreated and 14…

Recent research by Swain (2000a, 2000b, 1998, 1995), Swain and Lapkin (2001, 1998, 1995) and Kowal and Swain (1997, 1994) has examined the role of collaborative tasks in focusing immersion students' attention on the need for explicit knowledge of grammatical forms and lexical items in the production (especially written) of French texts. This is…

This study investigated the impact of a short-term interaction-focused parenting curriculum on maternal behaviors and child development outcomes. Participants were 94 teen-mother-child dyads; 48 in the intervention group received a relationship-focused curriculum offered in 24, 1-hour sessions. Maternal behaviors during play were videotaped and…

A sample of 60 children in Grade 3 was followed over one year. In the first year, an extensive battery of assessments was used including aspects of reading, arithmetic, and working memory. Teachers rated the children on 7-point scales on various motivational dimensions summarized to a total score tentatively called task orientation. In the…

The authors summarize the research on the effects of computer use by young children, concentrating especially on implications for social, emotional, and cognitive development. They cover effects on children's language and reading, creativity, and mathematics learning. They note the importance of teacher planning for appropriate computer use in the…

In this article, the authors argue that despite the variable of language proficiency of young, immigrant children and educational programs designed for their language development (for example, ESL, Transitional Bilingual, Dual Language Bilingual, Sheltered Content Instruction), the strategy of historical thinking can help immigrant children…