Identification of language disorders in children younger than 3 years remains challenging despite agreement that early intervention improves outcomes. This study of twin language and gesture development substantiated the twinning effect, an unexplained lag in expressive and receptive language seen in twins, for a group of 88, 16- to 18-month-old…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a quick shift to virtual speech-language services; however, only a small percentage of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) had previously engaged in telepractice. The purpose of this clinical tutorial is: (1) to describe how the Early Language and Literacy Acquisition in Children with Hearing Loss…

There is evidence showing that both maturational and environmental factors can impact on later language development. On the one hand, preterm birth has been found to increase the risk of deficits in the preschool and school years. Preterm children show poorer auditory discrimination, reading difficulties, poor vocabulary, less complex expressive…

As we listen to speech, our ability to understand what was said requires us to retrieve and bind together individual word meanings into a coherent discourse representation. This so-called semantic unification is a fundamental cognitive skill, and its development relies on the integration of neural activity throughout widely distributed functional…

Background: The role of domain-general short-term memory (STM) in language development remains controversial. A previous finding from the HelSLI study on children with developmental language disorder (DLD) suggested that not only verbal but also non-verbal STM for temporal order is related to language acquisition in monolingual children with DLD.…

The purpose of this paper is to provide background for the vision statement, "An Argument-based Framework for Valid and Actionable Assessment for English Learners in Secondary Grades." We begin by identifying the problem we intended to address in the vision statement for an assessment framework. This is followed by a discussion about the…

An intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system is an application to provide users instruction and practice as they learn a second language. In order to be more effective and more widely adopted, ICALL must better align with second language acquisition (SLA) research, moving away from menu-based or fill-in-the-blank exercises and…

Situated in China and under the context of curriculum reform, this project is an effort to combine long-time separate research streams in language teaching and learning studies: the history-in-person perspective (Holland & Lave, 2001) and the discourse analysis perspective (Cazden, 1988). Informed by the concepts of…

The Inclusive Reading Club for Young Children presented the study of organizing the reading club activities as an inclusive setting that promote the literacy skills and language development (such as hold books, re-tell story, comprehensive reading skills, response to wh-questions, writing their name) of young Dual language learners, child with…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many schools were forced to interrupt in-person delivery of educational services and switched to delivery of instruction in a remote setting. The educational impacts of school closures and remote instructional delivery have become a concern for the impact on an entire generation of students. Although delivery of…

In this chapter I address what I see as the cornerstone for advancing our understanding of how results from empirical research into L2 interactional development can usefully be brought to bear on L2 education--be it curriculum design, teaching or testing--, namely an epistemologically coherent understanding of interactional competence and its…

More than half of the students with visual impairment (VI) have an additional developmental disability (DD) in the United States. Young children with VI and DD are at risk for language delay and these children need planned learning experiences to increase their language skills. Teachers of students with VI (TVI) have received training and special…

The present study focuses on the development of Spanish pronominal processing. We investigate whether the "pronoun interpretation problem" (i.e., reflexive pronouns comprehension is resolved at an earlier age than that of personal pronouns, also known as the "Delay of the Principle B Effect"), which has been documented in other…

What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non-cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than…