Discusses the reliability and validity of different measures of lexical richness in various language data research and computer simulations, and examines the behavior of these measures in spontaneous speech data of first language and second language children learning Dutch, aged 4 to 7, compared with their lexical abilities as measured by tests.…

Provides an overview of the articles in this issue of the Tribal College Journal, which demonstrate how tribal colleges are gradually creating places where Native languages are safe. Asserts that a place where the language is honored is a place that education, too, becomes honored, and that recognizing Native languages leads to self-esteem and…

This study investigated developmental changes in lexical production skills in early sequential bilinguals, in both Spanish and English, with 100 individuals of different ages whose first language was Spanish. A pattern was found of Spanish dominance in the youngest children, through relatively balanced Spanish and English skills in middle…

Summarizes recent studies identifying specific linguistic-cognitive markers for reading disabilities and describes efforts to develop measures of these markers in the areas of phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, and verbal short-term memory. (Author/DB)

Investigates the discourse coherence of school-aged children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with SLI were found to be significantly impaired in the areas of topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed. (Author/ER)

Examines essential components of quality two-way bilingual immersion programs. Discusses language acquisition research underlying context-embedded content-area instruction in a second language; research on the benefits of bilingualism in terms of academic, cognitive, and metalinguistic development; and the link between bilingualism and positive…

A Japanese wife and American husband raised their daughter to be bilingual by using the "one-parent/one-language approach," in which each parent speaks only their native language with her. Upon reaching school age, her bilingualism was maintained through home schooling in America, an experimental school in Japan, and exposure to Japanese and…

Two experiments were conducted using match-to-sample methodologies in an effort to model lexical classes, which include both arbitrary and perceptual relations between class members. Training in both experiments used a one-to-many mapping procedure with nonsense syllables as samples and eight sets of abstract stimuli as comparisons. These abstract…

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words.…

The preschool years ages 3 and 4 are extremely important for social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of preschool to heighten awareness and inform administrators, educators, families, and policymakers about the value of preschool and in particular preschool literacy…

Patterns of development in language and play for full term and preterm children from 6 to 54 months and the effects of maternal parenting strategies (i.e., maintaining attentional focus, use of directiveness) were examined. Significant risk differences in the growth of both language and play were found. The high risk children were more likely to…

Picture naming and picture identification tasks were used to investigate lexical-semantic skills in young children learning Hmong as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). A total of 19 children, ages 3; 4 (years; months)-5; 2, participated in this study. Performance on lexical tasks was analyzed as a function of development…

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,…

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…