For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

Children's speech development begins in infancy. The pattern of this development has been explored in studies over a number of years using a range of research methodology and approaches to investigation. A systematic review of the existing literature was carried out to determine the collective contribution of this literature to our understanding…

A review of the literature on development of verbal language by sighted and blind children is followed by report of a study showing no gross differences in the language of intellectually normal sighted and blind adolescents. (CL)

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

Reviews research concerning language acquisition in infants, particularly the acquisition of syntax. Topics of discussion include the problem of language acquisition, theories of language acquisition, and the progression from competing hypotheses to mutually reinforcing theories. (RJC)

Reading skills change developmentally, from acquisition of decoding skills to reading-to-learn. This article discusses the non-instructional and instructional factors that associate with acquisition, and the non-instructional and instructional factors that associate with reading-to-learn. (Author/BW)

In Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, three categories of environmental control over instances of verbal behavior appear to be relevant to the study of infant vocal development: the mand, the tact, and the echoic categories. Procedures used in the remediation of language deficiencies and procedures found in work in the area of language…

Noting that children's talk makes some of their thinking visible and thereby provides a ready tool for early childhood teachers, this chapter focuses on the process of language acquisition. The chapter provides a historical context for language in early childhood education, discussing the nature of language and its acquisition, the development of…

Based on an empirical study of over 3,000 learning disabled children and on a review of research, the paper outlines intellectual, attention and verbal mediation, social-affective, and oral and written characteristics of learning disabled students. Among the findings reported are the following: the median educational retardation is one grade below…

This article offers a framework for language intervention focusing on conversational interaction, suggests some parallels between oral conversations and the development of literacy, and offers guidelines for facilitating the development of language and literacy. Implications for a model of written language are discussed. (PB)

This research review sought to discover the forms of family verbal interaction that nurture language development in infants and toddlers, the function of different family members in this process, and the role of environmental factors in language development. Results indicate that speech to a child is significantly different from speech to an…

To determine the designs, procedures, and findings of studies related to an investigation of the developmental aspects of the writing processes of children, a literature search was made of documents indexed in "Current Index to Journals in Education" (CIJE) and "Resources in Education" (RIE). A search was also made of the literature in…

The connections among language learning, language education, and children's wordplay are explored in this book. Each chapter examines some aspect of the interrelations between wordplay activities and the goals of language education. The book is divided into three sections, with the first section exploring wordplay and language learning in the…

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

This article reviews the literature regarding the seeds of literacy in preschool students. Conclusions indicate that children learn many basic concepts of print communication from daily experience with its use well before any ability to decode writing emerges. Games and other everyday interactions with print are recommended for facilitating…