Effective peer interaction is fundamental to social development, cognitive development, and academic success. Young children's early exposure to and development of social competence begins in the home and is further developed upon entry into early childhood programmes. In the United States, where early childhood programmes serve increasingly…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom language contexts characterized by peer language skills and proportions of dual language learners (DLL) influenced English language development for DLL and non-DLL children. Participants were 2,131 children from 135 classrooms across preschool through Grade 3. Children were classified into…

Current Portuguese Public Law No. 3/2008 requires the use of the International Classification of Functioning, Health and Disability for Children and Youth (ICF-CY) as a reference framework to guide assessment and intervention procedures for students with additional support needs. This study explores whether the ICF-CY use fostered multidimensional…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to (a) describe and compare the nonword repetition (NWR) performance of preschool-age Spanish-speaking children (3- to 5-year-olds) with and without language impairment (LI) across 2 scoring approaches and (b) to contrast the classification accuracy of a Spanish NWR task when item-level and percentage…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to retrospectively examine the preschool language and early literacy skills of kindergarten good and poor readers, and to determine the extent to which these skills predict reading status. Method: Participants were 136 children with language impairment enrolled in early childhood special education classrooms.…

Behavior rating scales are popular assessment tools but more research is needed on the preschool versions of the instruments, particularly with referred samples of preschoolers. This study examined the comparability of results from parent ratings on the preschool versions of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL/1.5-5, Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000)…

Using a Bernsteinian theoretical framework, this study compares two American early childhood centres, one with a primarily progressive pedagogy (Frank Lloyd Wright Family Centre) and one with a primarily traditional pedagogy (Casimir Pulaski Centre), in high-poverty Chicago neighbourhoods to examine the effects of different pedagogic practices on…

Broad-band or multidimensional behavior-rating scales are common tools for evaluating children. Two popular behavior-rating scales, the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (BASC-2; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2004) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000), have undergone downward extensions so that…

We test whether comparison can promote learning of new relational abstractions. In Experiment 1, preschoolers heard labels for novel spatial patterns and were asked to extend the label to one of two alternatives: one sharing an object with the standard or one having the same relational pattern as the standard. Children strongly preferred the…

Background: Traditional disability categories may reveal little of the functional characteristics and social competence of a child. Objective: To compare the social competence of typically developing children, children with established disabilities and undiagnosed children identified by a functional approach to be in need of special support.…

The current study developed a taxonomy of reading skills and compared this taxonomy with skills being trained in 30 commercially available software programs designed to teach emergent literacy or literacy-specific skills for children in preschool, kindergarten, and Grade 1. Outcomes suggest that, although some skills are being trained in a…

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

Children with and without intellectual disabilities were observed playing with toys during both home-based independent play and classroom-based freeplay situations. Categorical and sequential play was analysed for within- and between-group patterns. Within-group patterns during classroom freeplay were similar for both groups. There were no…

This study compares the attitudes of preschool teachers and students between the Netherlands and Germany towards typical play activities in preschool. The data were responses to short video clips of preschool children's play and elicited the respondents' attitudes through questionnaires. The data were analysed by classifying the written responses…