This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and…

Leading experts in infant/toddler development have contributed succinct essays drawn from research, theory, clinical case studies, and carefully documented practice. Each essay represents current thinking in the field of infant/toddler development and care. Individually and as a collection, the essays provide a springboard for reflection,…

Children learn to communicate in the context of their home culture. Beginning at birth, children use their home language and culturally accepted communication styles to connect with others in a meaningful way, forming secure relationships that are intrinsic to healthy development. For the early childhood teacher, it is important to establish…

To examine language outcomes related to language acquisition and academic readiness, this study followed a group of toddlers with slow expressive language development (SELD) through their kindergarten year. Subjects were 27 children between 20 and 34 months who produced fewer than 50 words or no 2-word combinations on L. Resconla's (1989) Language…

"Scaffolding" refers to the temporary support that parents and others give a child to perform a task. In narrative contexts, children's speech is guided and scaffolded by mothers who initiate and elicit children's contributions about past experiences. Unfortunately, data on this phenomenon from languages other than English are very…

The 115 tests cited in this bibliography are measures for infants through preschool age children, that focus on language acquisition. Some determine developmental level, others deal with aspects of language ability at various levels. Measures for a variety of populations, including native Spanish speakers, and handicapped infants, are cited. This…

An investigation of the first language acquisition of productive nouns in Inuktitut (Inupiaq) is presented. This study begins with descriptions of noun incorporation, relevant aspects of the structure of Inuktitut, and working criteria of productivity. Acquisition data from Inuktitut and corroborating data from Greenlandic are outlined and…

The home's supportive setting, which has the potential to encourage children to share their thoughts and feelings through spoken language, is the basis of the home's strength as a communicative context. Teachers can help extend this sharing of meaning by creating classroom environments in which written language experiences and microcomputer-based…

This ERIC Digest delineates problems posed by the increasing number of language-minority children in schools and offers suggestions for teaching children from different cultures. It is maintained that a group's language reflects its culture, and the uses to which that language is put are culturally determined. When children and adults do not share…

Videotapes have proven useful in studying children's early classroom writing experiences, capturing and preserving the contextual integrity of the writing situation in a way that would be nearly impossible to do in words. Because the tapes can be played over and over again, it is possible to extract meanings from the situation that might otherwise…

A study investigated the writing processes of four fourth grade students--two girls and two boys--as they participated in an 18-session writing workshop. The sessions were held three times a week for 6 weeks, each lasting 45-minutes. Data were collected through (1) observations of the children as they interacted and composed, revised, edited,…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

The focus of this paper is on how children use print, or literate language, in school and how teachers can respond and work with children. Beginning with a literature review, the paper discusses language use and literate language development in young children, pointing out that children construct their experiences through using language, and that…

This study focused on whether a supplemental program in structural analysis would improve the reading proficiency of children identified as deficient in the syntax and inflections of their language. Sixty-nine second-grade children, whose psycholinguistic ages were determined by scores on a grammatic closure test, to be six months or more below…

This paper analyzes spoken usage of English prepositions by two groups of Ontarian elementary students at the Grade 2 and Grade 5 levels. The first group (29 subjects) consists of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from Welland and Sudbury. The second group (8 subjects) is composed of monolingual English students from Toronto. Examination of the…