Twenty pediatric users of cochlear implants were administered three tests of speech intelligibility. Correlational analyses showed significant correlations among overall scores for contrast perception intelligibility, contrast production intelligibility, and production sentence intelligibility, however, relationships were more tenuous at finer…

Describes a bilingual prekindergarten teacher's approach to oral language development with children who are Spanish-language dominant, considering the links between her approach and constructivist learning theory. Describes how children in the classroom interact socially with adults and peers to develop oral language skills. (JPB)

This article reviews recent research suggesting that individuals with dyslexia benefit enormously from being taught language structure explicitly, and concludes that many teachers are underprepared to teach language processes and structures to children with language-based learning problems. A call is made for an approach to teacher education that…

Analysis of videotapes of the signed communication (mostly Signed Exact English) of five preschool children with deafness in a special class found their communications brief and focused on the here-and-now. Topics of conversation were similar to those of nondisabled children. Child-initiated utterances were longer and more semantically diverse…

Notes that early childhood teachers need to encourage language and literacy development in a culturally responsive way, by acknowledging students' home culture, encouraging collaboration between students of different backgrounds, and setting the same standards of achievement for all students. Provides examples of culturally responsive learning…

Examined relationships between quality of center-based child care and infant cognitive and language development. Subjects were 79 African American 1-year-olds. Found that quality of infant care positively correlated with scores on standardized assessment of cognitive development, language development, and communication skills. Quality of care in…

A kindergarten teacher and a language development teacher collaborated in using a thematic literature activity, in which kindergartners focused on a book which was read to them, discussed it, and engaged in related dramatic play; discussed feelings and drew pictures; and recalled earlier sessions of the activity. The kindergarten teacher extended…

This article examines the multiple factors necessary to attainment of transcultural competence for language specialists in educational settings. Issues discussed include structural linguistics, psycholinguistics, social psychological issues, and, most important, sociolinguistics. Cultural issues in the client-therapist-teacher relationship are…

Explores the second-language learning process from the point of view of what early childhood educators need to know to understand and help young second-language-learners. Discusses types of programs for preschoolers whose home language is not English and the developmental sequence of second-language acquisition. Considers issues of supporting…

This study evaluated the validity of language-assessment instruments with Native American children, ages 3 to 5. Results indicated that the Preschool Language Scale-3 provides a valid assessment of the receptive and expressive language skills of 3- and 4-year-old Native-American children. However, use of this scale with 5-year-old Native Americans…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

This study examined developmental changes in lexical comprehension in 100 bilingual individuals at five age levels, all of whom had learned Spanish as a first language and English beginning at age 5. Although skills improved in both languages over time, by middle childhood performance was better in English, with this transition occurring earlier…

Four approaches to the investigation of connections between language by hand and language by eye are described and illustrated with studies from a decade-long research program. The four approaches support a model in which language by hand and language by eye are separate systems that interact in predictable ways. (Contains references.) (CR)

Analyzed the development of two morphological structures in Hebrew, one inflectional and the other derivational, and examined the mutual contribution of morphological knowledge and learning the written code. In a longitudinal design, 40 children were tested twice on two oral tasks--inflecting nouns for possession and deriving denominal…

A language assessment procedure was used with spontaneous spoken and written language samples of 13 orally trained children with hearing loss in integrated classrooms in two Israeli elementary schools. Results revealed significant differences between spoken and written language samples of these children in various correct syntactic structures,…