Along with early detection, early intervention (EI) is critical for children identified with hearing loss. Evidence indicates that many children with sensorineural hearing loss experience improved language abilities if EI services were initiated at an "early" age. The present study's objectives were to determine the impact of a state EI program on…

This study examined strategies for spelling accuracy in Grade 3 children. Thirty bilingual, Afrikaans-English speaking children and 30 monolingual, English-speaking children were assessed on their ability to spell English words and non-words. The bilingual children were also assessed on their Afrikaans word and non-word spelling abilities. In…

The number of children receiving cochlear implants (CIs) with significant disabilities in addition to their deafness has increased substantially. Unfortunately, children with additional disabilities receiving CIs have largely been excluded from studies on cochlear implant outcomes. Thus limited data exists on outcomes in this population to guide…

Featuring contributions from a unique mix of authors--classroom teachers, teacher educators, and children's book authors--this volume explores the value of stories in promoting children's language and literacy learning. Major sections cover the most fundamental and critical foundations for language and literacy growth--including first language…

The effectiveness of a language-training procedure that emphasized reinforcing vocal "reasonable attempts" (any response directed at an interventionist and within a broader class of correct responses) was compared with a procedure that emphasized shaping (reinforcing successive approximations that more closely resembled the target vocalization).…

Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether they are natural (founded in principles of universal grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in learning. Some languages have phonological…

Scale errors refer to behaviors where young children attempt to perform an action on an object that is too small to effectively accommodate the behavior. The goal of this study was to examine the frequency and characteristics of scale errors in everyday life. To do so, the researchers collected parental reports of children's (age range = 13-21…

Changes in global patterns of residence mean that preschool teachers welcome immigrant children and families into preschools in increasing numbers. Many teachers report both anticipation and apprehension about having immigrant children in the classroom. Apprehension is related to concerns about a lack of enough knowledge about languages and…

This study measured longitudinal change in six parameters of infant utterances (i.e. number of sounds, CV syllables, supraglottal consonants, and repetitions per utterance, temporal duration, and seconds per sound), investigated previously unexplored characteristics of repetition (i.e. number of vowel and CV syllable repetitions per utterance) and…

People gesture a great deal when speaking, and research has shown that listeners can interpret the information contained in gesture. The current research examines whether learners can also use co-speech gesture to inform language learning. Specifically, we examine whether listeners can use information contained in an iconic gesture to assign…

We investigated whether 1-year-old infants use their shared experience with an adult to determine the meaning of a pointing gesture. In the first study, after two adults had each shared a different activity with the infant, one of the adults pointed to a target object. Eighteen- but not 14-month-olds responded appropriately to the pointing gesture…

Early literacy development, assessment, and teaching have been significant foci of research and practice in the 21st, century. Multiple new early literacy curricula and assessments for preschoolers have been created since 2001. Tracking the emergent literacy growth of developmentally young children is essential to planning appropriate programs…

This study evaluates 39 different phonetic inventories of 16 Spanish-speaking children (ages 0;11 to 5;1) in terms of hierarchical complexity. Phonetic featural differences are considered in order to evaluate the proposed implicational hierarchy of Dinnsen et al.'s phonetic inventory typology for English. The children's phonetic inventories are…

Crosslinguistic transfer in bilingual language acquisition has been widely reported in various linguistic domains (e.g., Dopke, 1998; Nicoladis, 1999; Paradis, 2001). In this study we examined structural overlap (Dopke, 2000; Muller and Hulk, 2001) and dominance (Yip and Matthews, 2000) as explanatory factors for crosslinguistic transfer in…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…