Infants who stay in emergency shelters with their families are most likely to demonstrate resilience despite homelessness if they experience positive, nurturing relationships with their parents. We discuss the strengths and challenges of infants experiencing family homelessness as well as intervention and research evaluation in those contexts.…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

Children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) using Listening and spoken language (LSL) as their primary mode of communication have emerged as a growing population in general education and special education classroom settings, and have educational performance expectations similar to their same aged hearing peers. Academic instruction that…

Brain imaging studies suggest that children can simultaneously develop, learn, and use two languages. A visual language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), facilitates development at the earliest possible moments in a child's life. Spoken language development can be delayed due to diagnostic evaluations, device fittings, and auditory skill…

In the 1950s, the assessment and management of children with language impairments emphasized their auditory and visual processing deficits and relied heavily on classifications of adult language disorders. Many compelling theoretical insights were offered, but research in language acquisition was in its infancy. It was not until the 1960s and…

Despite the fact that to date Visual Literacy (VL) scholars have not arrived at a general consensus for a theoretical organization of the VL field, important conceptual investigations have emerged over the past four decades. In this paper we discuss and synthesize those studies. We then present a first attempt toward a cohesive theory of VL. The…

This article introduces a promising new methodology called optical imaging. Optical imaging is used for measuring changes in cortical blood flow due to functional activation. The article outlines the pros and cons of using optical imaging for studying the brain correlates of perceptual, cognitive, and language development in infants and young…

For 8-year-old Josh Greiner, the old cliche that music is a universal language has new meaning. As he adapts to a world where being non-verbal sometimes makes it hard to fit in, Josh is coming to understand the power of a song to break everyday communication barriers and provide motivation to try things. Music has always been a part of his daily…

Studies indicate thoughtfully planned chants integrated with shared book reading help young children remember concepts and vocabulary they hear in literature, capture children's imagination, develop their rhyming acuity, and background knowledge, and increase their sense of story structure, understanding of story sequence, phonological awareness,…

Using works of art with young children is a perfect way to bridge the gap between art activities that are too open or too closed. Teachers of young children sometimes try to find a middle ground by allowing free painting time at an easel in addition to recipe-oriented activities such as putting together precut shapes to create a spider or an apple…

An outline of seven important steps for teaching vocabulary development includes components of language development, visual memory, visual-auditory perception, speeded recall, spelling, reading the word in a sentence, and word comprehension in written context. (JN)

The understanding that choice of words in an individual's language construction is a reflection of her or his perspective is not new. This article examines the mindful and intimate link between language and empathetic perspective--the language that the author, as an individual, employ's in her daily life to what she, as an individual, constructs…

The Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind (WLG) theory of the neurobiological basis of language is of great historical importance, and it continues to exert a substantial influence on most contemporary theories of language in spite of its widely recognized limitations. Here, we suggest that neurobiologically grounded computational models based on the WLG…

English has become the medium for communication in so many areas, and children are the hope of the future and shoulder the duties to structure the future. Children's English becomes more important and spreads all over the world, especially in recent years. The children's English is not perfect and it exists its own disadvantages, so this paper…

The paper describes the development of the "Test of Thought and Language" (Total) which is intended to allow first grade teachers to determine if students are ready for phonics instruction or if, for some students, the curriculum should first develop language concepts, structures and thinking processes. Background information for the…