Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often demonstrate delays in early language and literacy skills. Shared reading, the practice of adults reading aloud to children while using behaviors (e.g., asking questions) that are meant to promote interaction between the adult and child, is an intervention that has had positive effects on those…

Nursery is a preparation for kindergarten education. This paper deals with the gained competence of the nursery as they move up to the kindergarten program of the K-12 Curriculum in the Philippines. This study reveals that there are similarities and differences in the curriculum programs of nursery and kindergarten; that the nursery children…

Writing involves a number of skills and being self-directed in the process would contribute to greater effectivity. The concept of autonomography, or being self-directed in terms of writing, draws from the literature on self-directed learning and specifically self-directed writing, where concepts such as self-regulation and learner autonomy are…

The purposes of this study are to examine the relation between playing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) games in the wild and L2 English vocabulary and to offer comparisons with non-gamers' vocabulary. Data were collected from two samples of teenage L2 English learners in Sweden, Sample A (N = 1,069) and Sample B (N = 16). Questionnaires and…

Focusing on 84 Chinese-English dual language learners (DLLs) in U.S. preschool programs serving children from low-income backgrounds, this study investigated which aspects of the home language and literacy environment and which parenting styles may be related to these DLLs' oral receptive and expressive language abilities in Chinese and English.…

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in…

Read-alouds play an important role in young children's literacy development. Teacher education programs include read-alouds as part of balanced literacy instruction and many preservice teachers are required to read aloud to others in their teacher education programs. There are many excellent resources teacher educators may use to help preservice…

Languages differ in their preferences for particular intensifying constructions. While intensifying adjectival compounds (IACs) (e.g. "ijskoud, ice-cold") are productively used to express intensification in Dutch and English, in French this construction is hardly productive. Consequently, French-speaking learners may encounter…

Research Findings: A social validity measure was used to examine 56 bilingual preschool teachers' perceptions and acceptability of an interactive shared book reading vocabulary intervention implemented in English with Spanish-speaking preschool children (N = 334) in a dual language program model. Social validity outcomes indicated that bilingual…

A growing body of literature has begun to explore social attention in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with hopes of identifying early differences that are associated with later ASD or other aspects of development. The present study used eye-tracking to familiar (mother) and unfamiliar (stranger) faces in two groups…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

Research Findings: This study considered the interplay between infant temperament and maternal caregiving behaviors in relation to early language. A total of 118 mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Mothers rated infant positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), and maternal behaviors were coded during a free-play task when infants…

This exploratory study examines the effect of (extra)curricular target-language contact on learners' abilities to perceive and to express identity and intentions in a second language (L2). Drawing on the self-reported abilities of 38 Canadian French-as-a-second-language learners during interviews and via questionnaires, preliminary qualitative…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how culture impacts recipients' perceptions of the effectiveness of a public apology (Netflix apology). Data were collected through a survey instrument that included both Likert Scale items and short response items. A selected number of participants from each group were also interviewed.…

According to the Extended Statistical Learning account (ExSL; Stokes, Kern & dos Santos, 2012) late talkers (LTs) continue to use neighborhood density (ND) as a cue for word learning when their peers no longer use a density learning mechanism. In the current article, LTs expressive ("active") lexicon ND values differed from those of…