A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on…

Adele Miccio recognized the paucity of information on the phonological development of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and emphasized the need to apply advances in bilingual phonological research toward an appropriate phonological measure for bilingual children. In the spirit of her pioneering work, the present study…

The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making and progress monitoring for infants and toddlers. With increasing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education and intervention for all children, measurement plays an important role in documenting children's progress and outcomes of…

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan-Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish-Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite…

This paper attempts to address the issue of language development in hearing impaired children. It argues that interpreters, teachers or peers can provide deaf children with language exposure so that they can acquire their native languages more easily. It also argues that the provision of a developmentally appropriate print-rich environments is the…

Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching (PMT) is an intervention designed to teach young children to initiate nonverbal communication using vocalizations, gestures, and eye-gaze. Children are taught through social routines in their natural environment. Techniques include contriving an environment in which the children will be motivated to communicate and…

Purpose: Personal narratives are common in children's conversations, recommended as the appropriate genre for early writing by educators, and part of many high-stakes tests, possibly because they tend to be better formed than fictional narratives. However, current practice in the field of speech-language pathology employs fictional narratives in…

This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2), and specific language impairment (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI…

Hartshorne and Ullman (2006 ) presented naturalistic language data from 25 children (15 boys, 10 girls) and showed that girls produced more past tense overregularization errors than did boys. In particular, girls were more likely to overregularize irregular verbs whose stems share phonological similarities with regular verbs. It was argued that…

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

The relationship between preschoolers' puzzlemaking strategies and part-whole perception was investigated in the present study. Forty-eight two year olds and 48 four year olds were randomly selected from eight licensed childcare centers. Puzzlemaking strategies (image, form, color, and trial and error) were measured by performance in the…

The assessment of so-called depth of word knowledge has been the focus of research for some years now. In this article the construct of deep word knowledge is further specified as the decontextualized knowledge of word meanings and word associations. Most studies so far have involved adolescent and adult second language learners. In this article,…

This article argues that poetry written by nineteenth-century British and American deaf poets played an important role in the period's sign language debates. By placing the publication of this poetry in the context of public exhibitions of deaf students, I suggest that the poetry was mobilized to publicly defend the linguistic and intellectual…

Target language as the sole medium of instruction mimics the environment of first language acquisition and immersion programs. There are no short cuts when teaching a toddler to follow instructions. It takes many tries, but each effort at communicating is a learning opportunity. Early language learners are very amenable to immersion settings.…