This study explored the effects of an evidence-based literacy program, ABRACADABRA, on the spelling abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty children with ASD aged 5-11 years were assigned to matched instruction and waitlist control groups. Children in the instruction group received 26 hrs of individualized, home-based…

Collocational competence is recognized to be integral to native-like L2 performance, and concordancing can be of assistance in gaining this competence. This study reports on an investigation into the effect of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on the collocational competence of Iranian intermediate learners of English in the context of…

This community effectiveness trial examined the feasibility and efficacy of a comprehensive psychosocial treatment for 28 children, aged 7 to 10 years with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASDs). Treatment included instruction and therapeutic activities targeting social skills, face-emotion recognition skills, interest expansion, and…

Krashen (2004) has advocated that narrow reading, i.e., reading a series of texts addressing one specific topic, is an effective method to grow vocabulary. While narrow reading has been championed to have many advantages for L2 vocabulary learning, there remains a relative dearth of empirical studies that test the impact of narrow reading on L2…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

Narratives require the integration of many different linguistic skills and can be used as an ecologically valid measure of child language development. This study investigated the narrative skills of 18 six- to seven-year-old prelingually deaf children who received simultaneous bilateral cochlear implants (CI) between 5 and 18 months of age. No…

This research addresses the challenges of assessing receptive language abilities in minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder by comparing several adapted measurement tools: a standardized direct assessment of receptive vocabulary (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4); caregiver report measures including scores on the Vineland-II…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class…

Relationships exist between language ability, emotion regulation, and social competence in preschool children. This study examines how these relationships function in elementary school children, and explores whether language ability partially mediates the relationship between emotion regulation and social competence. Second-grade students (N = 67)…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine child and environmental factors known to be associated to language development and how they relate to results in expressive vocabulary, expressive language, and receptive language in language-delayed toddlers. The cross-sectional data on 96 French-speaking children aged 18-36 months were…

The aim of this study was to compare the prosodic profiles of English- and Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS), examining cross-linguistic differences. Two groups of children with WS, English and Spanish, of similar chronological and nonverbal mental age, were compared on performance in expressive and receptive prosodic tasks…

Recent models of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggest that the association between achievement motivation and school performance may be stronger in children with ADHD than in typically developing children. Therefore, the present study investigated associations between achievement motivation and performance on language skills and…

Child care studies that have examined links between teachers' qualifications and children's outcomes often ignore teachers' and children's transitions between classrooms at a center throughout the day and only take into account head teacher qualifications. The objective of this investigation was to examine these traditional assumptions and to…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

This study investigated whether students with reading disabilities (RD) showed greater regression in reading skills than did non-RD students over the summer vacation. The RD group consisted of 30 students in grades 4 to 6 from a private school for students with learning disabilities and a comparison group of 30 average readers in grades 4 to 6…