From the field of developmental psycholinguistics and from conceptual development theory there is evidence that excessive linguistic "code-switching" in early school education may pose some hazards for the learning of young multilingual children. In this article the author addresses the issue, invoking post-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian…

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present…

Using new literacies critically can be an excellent pedagogy for motivating and empowering students who feel alienated from their school and society. This article describes how one middle school teacher engaged his inner-city English language learners with critical media literacy as a way of making their learning more meaningful and motivating.…

Children vary widely in the rate at which they acquire words--some start slow and speed up, others start fast and continue at a steady pace. Do early developmental variations of this sort help predict vocabulary skill just prior to kindergarten entry? This longitudinal study starts by examining important predictors (socioeconomic status [SES],…

This study investigated the effect of a small-group storybook-based intervention on kindergarten students' vocabulary and narrative development, which is important to later reading achievement. Twenty-eight kindergarten children from a high-poverty urban school, all significantly behind their peers on standardized measures of language development…

Aim: General developmental outcome is known to be good in school-aged children who experienced febrile seizures. We examined cognitive and behavioural outcomes in preschool children with febrile seizures, including language and executive functioning outcomes. Method: This work was performed in the Generation R Study, a population-based cohort…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Objective: A previously published randomized clinical trial indicated that a developmental behavioral intervention, the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), resulted in gains in IQ, language, and adaptive behavior of children with autism spectrum disorder. This report describes a secondary outcome measurement from this trial, EEG activity. Method:…

The present study examined language production skills in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. A unique cued sentence generation task was created in order to reduce demands on memory and attention. Differences in sentence production abilities according to disease severity and cognitive impairments were assessed. Language samples were obtained from 20…

A crucial component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories and discovering relations between them. The organization of words into categories, and the generalization of patterns from some seen word combinations to novel ones, account for important aspects of the expansion of linguistic knowledge in the early…

The purpose of this study was to explore whether students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) could develop enhanced expressive speech acquisition through intervention via "Precision Songs" (Kantz & Kantz, 2004) and an eclectic curricula versus using only an eclectic curricula. Three hypotheses guided the study: (1) there is no…

Advice literature is ubiquitous. Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) argue that our modern lives motivate if not require us to consult the experts. In many fields, experts have negotiated a discourse accessible to the public in handbooks, guidebooks, self-help manuals, etc. As I discover in this study, these public discourses can reinscribe both…

Introduction. The use of three-five languages is of the greatest importance in order to form varied cooperative networks for the creation of new knowledge. Aim of the paper is to analyze the synergy between language acquisition and language learning. Materials and Methods. The search for the synergy between language acquisition and language…

This study's purpose was to examine the acquisition and use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries by African American English (AAE)-speaking children. The impetus for this work was the lack of information regarding the developmental trajectory of these auxiliary types and their use, in AAE relative to what is known about auxiliary acquisition and use…

Children, like adults, use referring expressions to refer to specific objects, events, or people. Research has provided insights into how children use referring expressions and the appearance of forms developmentally (Radford, 1990; Abu-Akel, et al., 2004; Pine & Lieven, 1997). This study examined how three, four, and five year-old children…