Purpose: The primary aim of the study was to examine the association between early childhood practitioners' use of language facilitation strategies during interactive book reading of informational texts related to science and the language skills of preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Twenty-four practitioners (12…

The study with 135 children (3-12 years of age) with Down Syndrome or other developmental disabilities found no significant differences in rate of gain across 6 domains when the amount of time in mainstreamed environments was varied. Down Syndrome subjects improved expressive language skills most at sites with no integration. (Author/DB)

This study examined the listener preparatory behaviors (LPBs) of selecting a listener, establishing listener proximity, and obtaining listener attention, as exhibited by 16 preschoolers with moderate to severe disabilities attending three different self-contained programs. It revealed that opportunities for children to display all three LPBs in…

Two experiments investigated the effects of peer modeling on the acquisition of receptive and expressive language responses. Experiment 1 studied lexical learning among five children who were mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. Experiment 2 investigated the observational learning of receptive and expressive language responses by two…

A study investigated the effects of using videotaped self-modeling on the acquisition of new linguistic structures used for requesting in three preschoolers with developmental disabilities. Participants were able to learn through self-modeling; however, initial difficulties with generalization to the classroom setting were found. (CR)

Comparison using paired t-tests of parent and teacher ratings for 16 preschool children on the Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale found no significant differences between parent and teacher ratings of expressive language, but a significant difference on the receptive language subscale. However, interrater reliability was relatively low…

Ten two-year-old children with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL), a brain injury associated with prematurity, were evaluated using language samples. The five children with delayed cognitive ability produced significantly fewer lexical tokens and spontaneous verbal utterances than did chronological age-matched nondelayed PVL children. (Author/DB)