Auditory speech discrimination is essential for normal language development. Children born preterm are at greater risk of language developmental delays. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy at term-equivalent age, the present study investigated early discrimination of speech prosody in 62 neonates born between week 23 and 41 of gestational…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds' (N = 32) learning of a new word for…

This study aimed to evaluate the language skills of preschool children through narrative. The Turkish Test of Early Language Development (TEDIL) was used to evaluate the receptive and expressive verbal language skills of the children, and language samples were collected using the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). The Mean Length of…

Background: The digital world and the concomitant changes in early childhood education have created uncertainty for teachers not knowing how to adjust their pedagogical practices of using digital play to enhance language development. Aim: This study aimed to analyse what teachers understand by digital play and how they use it for language teaching…

Emerging audio technologies over the last decade have provided a new, unprecedented window into the everyday lives of infants and young children. These new approaches will allow us to begin to address longstanding questions about the nature of language experiences across languages, communities and situations and the role of these experiences in…

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task,…

Year after year, English language learners are increasing at the Kenmakabi School District, mainly because of Hispanic and Haitian families who have settled in the township. Unfortunately, as this population continues to increase, so is the reading gap between them and their monolingual counterparts. Consequently, approximately seven years ago,…

Now in a revised and expanded third edition, this established course text and teacher guide explores the processes involved in second-language acquisition and translates the research into practical instructional strategies for PreK-12. Engaging classroom vignettes and personal reflections from the authors and other seasoned educators bring the…

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language…

The purpose of this pilot study was to develop and evaluate the feasibility of an experiential teaching and learning initiative that trained undergraduate students studying speech-language pathology to serve as family navigators promoting social communication and language development in infants and toddlers from lower-income backgrounds. Three…

Parents are a child's first teachers. They are responsible for building children's social, emotional, physical, and intellectual foundations. The problem investigated through this dissertation case study was the inconsistent knowledge of child development and developmentally appropriate activities among parents of young and primary school aged…

Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

When the B. F. Skinner Foundation reprinted Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" in 1992, Jack Michael wrote one of its two forewords, a detailed outline of the book's purpose and scope. On the 60th anniversary of the first publication (1957) of "Verbal Behavior", Jack reflects on the book's impact and its importance to the…

The suitability of the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm to capture relevant aspects of the acquisition of linguistic structures has been empirically tested in a number of EEG studies. Some have shown a syntax-related P600 component, but it has not been ruled out that the AGL P600 effect is a response to surface features (e.g.,…