Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

Purpose: Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell,…

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral…

Research Findings: The home literacy environment and particularly shared reading are central determinants of children's emergent literacy skills and predictors of their later reading development. Although the importance of frequent shared reading is well established, there is little knowledge about the age at which reading to children starts…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the kindergarten, first-, and second-grade predictors of reading comprehension in bilingual children. Specifically, we evaluated the role that Spanish and English skills play in predicting English reading comprehension in third grade. Method: As part of a longitudinal study, 248 bilingual children…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use…

Many recent studies about preschool early language and literacy skills utilize multiple assessments to identify young children who require additional multitiered instructional support. Although the use of a single screening instrument may be efficient but overidentify children in need of intervention, the universal administration of multiple…

The Student Oral Language Observation Matrix (SOLOM) is an assessment of oral language skills. The aim of this study was to examine psychometric properties of the SOLOM for preschoolers through (a) use of internal consistency methods to assess the reliability of the scores from the SOLOM and (b) examination of criterion-related validity by…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of switching from in-person assessment to virtual assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic on the growth trajectories of children with hearing loss who are learning spoken language. Method: Sixty-eight children with typical hearing, 44 children with cochlear implants, and 47 children…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd-grade predictors of reading comprehension in bilingual children. Specifically, we evaluated the role that Spanish and English skills play in predicting English reading comprehension in 3rd grade. Method: As part of a longitudinal study, 248 bilingual children were…

Given the importance of writing for academic achievement, this study aimed to understand how early oral language contributes to later writing skills. The first objective was to determine if preschool language skills were associated with high school writing, and if so, whether they contributed directly or indirectly through school age language. The…

Purpose: Using a new measure of family-level executive functioning (EF; the Family Characteristics Scale [FCS]), we investigated associations between family-level EF, spoken language, and neurocognitive skills in children with hearing loss (HL), compared to children with normal hearing. Method: Parents of children with HL (n = 61) or children with…

This study examines blending of classroom- and family-based supports within a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). The present study focuses on a sample of Head Start children who are both experiencing poverty and scoring below early language and literacy screening benchmarks. This study begins to explore which combination of resources are the…