Read-alouds not only reinforce story time traditions but also hold significant educational value when used strategically. Reading aloud benefits all students, no matter the grade or achievement level. This article explores a number of research-based academic benefits of reading aloud in K-12 classrooms. The author shares practical tips for…

Early childhood language experiences influence how a child's mind and brain process language and acquire literacy. For children growing up bilingual, their two languages interact in their minds, and these cross-linguistic influences can lead to unique neurocognitive mechanisms for language and reading compared to monolinguals. In this…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have difficulty with word learning. Recent studies have shown that incorporating retrieval practice provides a significant benefit to this learning. However, we have not yet discovered the best balance between the amount of retrieval and the amount of study (hearing the word in the…

The toddler and preschool years are a time of significant development in both expressive and receptive communication abilities. However, little is known about the neurobiological underpinnings of language development during this period, likely due to difficulties acquiring functional neuroimaging data. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)…

The goal of this study was to extend what is known about factors that contribute to the language-learning environment in early childhood classrooms. Two primary research questions were addressed: (a) Are measures of teacher use of classroom-wide positive behavior intervention and support (PBIS) strategies associated with the quality of teacher…

Grouping children of different ages in the same preschool classroom (i.e., mixed age) is widespread, but the evidence supporting this practice is mixed. A factor that may play a role in the relation between classroom age composition and child outcomes is peer skill. This study used a sample of 6,338 preschoolers (ages 3-5) to examine the influence…

Associations have been observed between socioeconomic status (SES) and language outcomes from early childhood, but individual variability is high. Exposure to high levels of stress, often associated with low-SES status, might influence how parents and infants interact within the early language environment. Differences in these early language…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

Exemplar-based learning requires: (1) a segmentation procedure for identifying the units of past experiences that a present experience can be compared to, and (2) a similarity function for comparing these past experiences to the present experience. This article argues that for a learner to learn a language these two mechanisms will require…

Families who live in the United States or migrated here from other countries and who do not speak English often feel pressured to stop using their home language with their children and to focus on learning English (Fillmore, 2000). This is true for hearing families and for families of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Parents report that…

A recent study by Ponari, Norbury, and Vigliocco (2018), showed that emotional valence (i.e. whether a word evokes positive, negative, or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to…

Training early years practitioners to facilitate the language development of young children is a widely used intervention. Evidence to support the effectiveness of training in terms of the impact of children's language development is limited. The Elklan Talking Matters programme is an accredited training programme for early years practitioners.…

Evidence suggests that the quantity of linguistic input experienced by infants in early childhood centres relates to the quality of educator-infant interactions. However, little is known about the linguistic properties of mutually responsive educator-infant interactions. This study uses sequence analyses to identify patterns of educator-infant…

The number of interventions focused on early language development in young children has increased over the past decade. There is a paucity of research on the adoption and implementation of these programs in real-world community settings. This study presents findings from qualitative interviews with leadership, staff, and past participants of a…

Purpose: It is common for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to simplify their utterances when talking to children with language delays, but there is disagreement about whether simplified utterances should be grammatical (e.g., "Daddy is running, See the cookie?") or telegraphic (e.g., "Daddy running, See cookie?"). This study…