Teaching children with autism is a challenging task for educators and parents, as the children display marked deficits in language and social behaviors. One of the major goals of an intervention program for children with autism is to provide them a method of functional communication and ample opportunities to practice these skills. For some…

Background: Teacher qualifications have been emphasized as a basis of professional development to improve classroom practices for at-risk children's school readiness. However, teacher qualifications have often not been compared to another form of professional development, in-service training. Objective: The current study attempts to investigate…

Background: This study investigates the use of requests for clarification in conversations between teenagers with a cochlear implant (CI) and hearing peers. So far very few studies have focused on conversational abilities in children with CI. Aims: The aim was to explore co-construction of dialogue in a referential communication task and the…

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in…

This study investigated three questions: Is it realistic to expect age-appropriate spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants (CIs) who received auditory-oral intervention during the preschool years? What characteristics predict successful spoken language development in this population? Are children with CIs more proficient in some…

Purpose: To examine the role of phonotactic probabilities at the onset of language development, in a new language (Dutch), while controlling for word position. Method: Using a nonword imitation task, 64 Dutch-learning children (age 2;2-2;8 [years;months]) were tested on how they imitated segments in low- and high-phonotactic probability…

This study examined associations between peers' expressive language abilities and children's development of receptive and expressive language among 1,812 four-year olds enrolled in 453 classrooms in 11 states that provide large-scale public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs. Higher peer expressive language abilities were positively associated with…

Background: Empirical studies suggest that individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) have difficulties in conceptualising dreams as perceptually private, non-physical, individuated and potentially fictional entities. The aim of the current study was to replicate the results found by Stenfert Kroese et al. using a comparative sample size, and…

The relationship between language and executive function (EF) and their development in children have been the focus of recent debate and are of theoretical and clinical importance. Exploration of these functions in children with a peripheral hearing loss has the potential to be informative from both perspectives. This study compared the EF and…

Storytelling-based arts projects offer a universal and inclusive pedagogy; challenging prejudices, celebrating diversity and promoting tolerance and resilience in participants. In addition they assist in the development of receptive and expressive language skills, provide a credible basis for understanding folklore, cultural traditions and social…

The Nova Scotia early intensive behavior intervention model--NS EIBI (Bryson et al., 2007) for children with autistic spectrum disorders was designed to be feasible and sustainable in community settings. It combines parent training and naturalistic one-to-one behavior intervention employing Pivotal Response Treatment--PRT (R. Koegel & Koegel,…

Background: There is a dearth of assessments of sign language development in young deaf children. This study gathered age-related scores from a sample of deaf native signing children using an adapted version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Fenson et al., 1994). Method: Parental reports on children's receptive and expressive signing were collected…

This study investigates the effects of rich explanation, baseline vocabulary, and home reading practices on English language learning (ELL) preschoolers' sophisticated vocabulary learning from storybook reading. Eighty typically developing preschoolers were pretested in L1 (Portuguese) and L2 (English) receptive vocabulary and were assigned to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of an 18-week program of direct and extended vocabulary instruction with kindergarten students on both proximal measures of target word knowledge and transfer measures of generalized language and literacy. A second purpose was to examine whether treatment effects would be moderated by…

The effect of bilingualism on the cognitive skills of young children was investigated by comparing performance of 162 children who belonged to one of two age groups (approximately 3- and 4.5-year-olds) and one of three language groups on a series of tasks examining executive control and word mapping. The children were monolingual English speakers,…