Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

Background: Teachers and clinicians may struggle to provide early identification to support multilingual children's language development. Dynamic assessments are a promising approach to identify and support children's language development. Aims: We developed and studied a novel word learning task that is dynamic and language neutral. It makes use…

Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children's reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge -- of the features of print -- to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual…

Background: Word reading and linguistic comprehension skills are two crucial components in reading comprehension, according to the Simple View of Reading (SVR). Some researchers have posited that a third component should be involved in reading and understanding texts, namely executive function (EF) skills. Aim: This study was novel in two ways.…

The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the contribution of phoneme awareness training and orthography to the learning of new vocabulary words by partial alphabetic phase readers. Hypotheses included: Preschoolers taught to phonemically segment words with letters would outperform those trained without letters on an invented spelling…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

Four-year-old (n = 20) and five-year-old (n = 22) bilingual children were tested twice in six months on Armenian (minority language) and English (majority language) picture identification and picture naming tasks to examine receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in both languages. Parental education, Armenian/English language exposure, and…

This dissertation investigates the importance of vocabulary development in kindergarten. The purpose of this qualitative case study design was to explore and describe how kindergarten teachers in 1 Midwestern U.S. suburban school district perceive and value the task of teaching vocabulary. The results were based on data collected from 2 focus…

Serial-order short-term memory (STM), as opposed to item STM, has been shown to be very consistently associated with lexical learning abilities in cross-sectional study designs. This study investigated longitudinal predictions between serial-order STM and vocabulary development. Tasks maximizing the temporary retention of either serial-order or…

Six pre-service teacher candidates TCs, each engaged in field experiences in Kindergarten or First Grade classrooms at an urban based elementary school compared the impact of interactive read alouds and simple read alouds on children's Tier two vocabulary meaning acquisition and usage. Each TC read a different trade book that contained at least 8…

This article reports on the preliminary findings of a two-staged empirical study aimed at gaining insights into the variables salient in the early language and literacy development of young English language learners (ELL). Increasingly, young ELL, whether foreign-born or Canadian-born, arrive at school with little developed English-language…

Purpose: This study assessed the fast mapping performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) across the preschool to kindergarten age span in relation to their phonological memory and vocabulary development. Method: Fifty-three children diagnosed with SLI and 53 children with normal language (NL) matched for age and gender (30…