To enhance the effectiveness of therapy for Spanish-speaking individuals and families requires an understanding of the subtleties of language use and interpretive processing. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the interpretive process in bilingual psychotherapists as they reflected upon their lived experiences of providing…

This lesson plan contains poetry-related activities that aim to help students read and interpret English poetry, and write their own poems. The activities are introduced in each of the following parts: talking about poetry, understanding poetic devices, interpreting poems, using poetry for language acquisition, writing original poems, performing…

The Multi-State Study of Pre-kindergarten by the National Center for Early Development & Learning (NCEDL) offers a first glance at pre-K children, teachers, and classroom quality in six states. This Snapshot overviews three recent articles co-authored by FPG scientists that summarize findings of the study about children, pre-K teachers, and…

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-[delta]/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) experience social difficulties, including conflict management. The factors involved in peer-conflict progression in pre-school children with LI, and which of these processes may differ from pre-school children with typical language development (TL), is therefore examined. Aims: To describe the…

There is a growing recognition of the importance of pre-literacy skills among pre-school children. Evidence that children from relatively deprived backgrounds face poorer outcomes in speech and language development and educational achievement has led to an assertive attempt to lessen social inequalities at the earliest opportunity. The UK…

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

Studies using the English and Spanish MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories demonstrated that the grammatical abilities of 20--30-month-old bilingual children were related more strongly to same-language vocabulary development than to broader lexical-conceptual development or maturation. First, proportions of different word types in each…

This paper reports on a study that examined both the concurrent and longitudinal connections between multiple components of the home environment and indicators of preschool-aged children's literacy and language development. Data were collected from 85 parents and their children at two different times. Results of structural path models indicated…

These are typical scenarios of children with hearing loss who are being included increasingly in early childhood settings. Recent federal legislation encourages states to develop programs to screen the hearing of all infants before they leave the hospital, and currently 39 states have adopted newborn infant hearing screening mandates (ASHA 2005).…

This study examines how rapid automatized naming (RAN) components-articulation time and pause time-develop from kindergarten to the end of first grade and how RAN components are related to different reading measures and to RAN total time. Sixty-two children were administered RAN tasks in kindergarten and at the beginning and end of Grade 1.…

The study investigated whether young children's health status is significantly related to their performance on measures of intelligence, language, and behavior, as well as parents' concerns, stress, and perceptions of their children's development. One hundred twelve 3 to 5 year-old children, recruited from a large pediatric practice and three…

The production of unstressed vowels in English by early and late Korean- and Japanese-English bilinguals was investigated. All groups were nativelike in having a lower fundamental frequency for unstressed as opposed to stressed vowels. Both Korean groups made less of an intensity difference between unstressed and stressed vowels than the native…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented root- and…