This study examined the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input to toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with toddlers with normal hearing (NH). The linguistic input to eighteen toddlers with MHL and twenty-four toddlers with NH was examined during a 10-minute free-play activity in their home environment. Results showed that…

This article synthesizes multiple studies that we have conducted on language and literacy practices among Latinx siblings at home, and identifies implications for teaching. Examples from micro-ethnographic discourse analyses provide rich vignettes of sibling interactions within Mexican and Central American immigrant households to illustrate how…

Purpose: This article describes the iterative development of a home review program designed to augment vocabulary instruction for young children (ages 4 and 5 years) occurring at school through the use of a home review component. Method: A pilot study followed by two experiments used adapted alternating treatment designs to compare the learning of…

Every year brings new research studies that aim to describe early childhood development. Despite this boom in research, there has been little useful translation of these studies into clear recommendations for educators and mental health practitioners. This book shows experienced educators and mental health practitioners who work with young…

This research was aimed at investigating the pedagogical roles of computer games (Hao et al, 2019, Chen & Hsu, 2019). It explored the impact of computer "mixed with language" (White et al, 2019) training, using simulation games, upon language acquisition and diverse daily-life knowledge. In a teacher preparation university of western…

Science provides a rich context for English learners (ELs) to develop language skills in meaningful ways. This article outlines steps to create a lesson that blends both inquiry science and formal English language development (ELD) strategies. The process, developed through a four-year research project in a large urban school district (Gomez-Zwiep…

Verbal memory is a fundamental prerequisite for language learning. This study investigated 7-month-olds' (N = 62) ability to remember the identity and order of elements in a multisyllabic word. The results indicate that infants detect changes in the order of edge syllables, or the identity of the middle syllables, but fail to encode the order…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to better understand how and when onset /l/ ("leap") and coda /l/ ("peel") are acquired by children by examining both the articulations involved and adults' perceptions of the produced segments. Method: Twenty-five typically developing Australian English-speaking children aged 3;0…

To learn from their environments, infants must detect structure behind pervasive variation. This presents substantial and largely untested learning challenges in early language acquisition. The current experiments address whether infants can use statistical learning mechanisms to segment words when the speech signal contains acoustic variation…

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French-learning infants' perceptual preference for…

Although regularity refers to the compatibility between pronunciation of character and sound of phonetic component, it has been suggested as being part of consistency, which is defined by neighborhood characteristics. Two experiments demonstrate how regularity effect is amplified or reduced by neighborhood characteristics and reveals the…

Previous work reveals that toddlers can accommodate a novel accent after hearing it for only a brief period of time. A common assumption is that children, like adults, cope with nonstandard pronunciations by relying on words they know (e.g. "this person pronounces sock as 'sack', therefore by 'black' she meant 'block'"). In this paper,…

Purpose: Given the growing prominence of computational modeling in the acquisition research community, we present a tutorial on how to use computational modeling to investigate learning strategies that underlie the acquisition process. This is useful for understanding both typical and atypical linguistic development. Method: We provide a general…

The Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), developed by Lewis and Simons and based on work by Fishman, provides a means of rating "language vitality"--the level of development or endangerment--where "development" is understood as adding or preserving functions and "endangerment" as loss of…

For the present review, we analyzed 28 studies researching the effects of interventions for parents with less education on the oral language development of their young children (ages 3-8). Two groups of interventions were distinguished: shared reading and other home activities. Within each group, we distinguished three categories of strategies:…