Research Findings: This study investigated the effectiveness of a home-based intervention in increasing the intrinsic reading motivation and Chinese oral vocabulary of minority South Asian children in Hong Kong. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 78 children (M[subscript age] = 51.54 months; control: 37 children, intervention: 41 children) and…

Purpose: Prior studies report conflicting descriptions of the relationships between phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and speech perception in preschoolers with speech disorders. This study sought to determine the nature of these relationships in a sample of school-aged children with residual speech sound errors affecting /[voiced alveolar…

A substantial number of multicomponent interventions have been developed to address social functioning in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For multicomponent interventions, identifying critical elements of the intervention related to behavior change is critical and may potentially improve the social validity of interventions. Such…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate whether families of children with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) are organized similarly to those of typically developing, typically hearing (TH) children and whether the dimensions of family dynamics and environment are related to spoken language development similarly in children with and without…

Family-program partnerships in early care and education have the potential to influence young children's development through multiple pathways. Guided by the Head Start (HS) Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE) framework, the current study uses data from the 2014 HS Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) to examine the direct, and…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have difficulty with word learning. Recent studies have shown that incorporating retrieval practice provides a significant benefit to this learning. However, we have not yet discovered the best balance between the amount of retrieval and the amount of study (hearing the word in the…

Background: Teaching vocabulary may be an effective way to address poor reading comprehension. However, it is unclear how many words or word families a school aged child with poor vocabulary would need to learn to meaningfully impact comprehension. This study provides estimates of vocabulary size for children with differing vocabulary achievement…

Purpose: A meaning-oriented auditory training program for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/hh) was assessed with regard to its efficacy in promoting novel word learning. Method: While administering the auditory training program, one of the authors (Elizabeth Mauzé) observed that children were learning words they previously did not know.…

Purpose: Learning spoken words can be challenging for children with hearing loss who communicate orally and who are known to have weaker oral vocabulary skills than age-matched children who hear. Since vocabulary skills play a crucial role in reading and literacy acquisition, and academic success, it is important to identify effective vocabulary…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that typically developing children, verbal children with a diagnosis of autism, children with Down syndrome, children with developmental language disorder, and children with dyslexia can all benefit from orthographic support during word learning tasks. This study sought to determine if minimally speaking…

Teachers in early childhood education (ECE) settings are central to providing children with high-quality experiences that promote both early development and long-term well-being; unfortunately, rates of teacher turnover are high in ECE settings. There are strong theoretical reasons to assume turnover is negatively linked with children's academic…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine whether otitis media (OM) in early childhood has an impact on language development in later childhood. Methods: We analyzed data from 1,344 second-generation (Generation 2) participants in the Raine Study, a longitudinal pregnancy cohort established in Perth, Western Australia, between 1989 and 1991. OM…

Family processes and parenting practices help explain developmental differences between children in low- versus higher-income households. There are, however, few studies addressing the question of: what are the key family processes and parenting practices for promoting low-income children's growth? We address this question in the present study,…