With increased demand for improved early childhood education services, it is important to better understand the essential professional development resources that have the greatest impact on both teacher and child outcomes. This study compared the effectiveness of two teacher-training models in bilingual Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Head…

Language skills developed during preschool contribute strongly to later reading and academic achievement. Effective preschool assessment and intervention should focus on core components of language development, specifically oral language skills. The Early Language and Literacy Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDIs) are a set of…

This study utilized latent growth-curve analyses to determine if the early literacy skills of children who were Spanish-speaking language-minority (LM) followed a similar quantitative growth profile over a preschool year as that of a group of children from a comparable socioeconomic (SES) background but who were not LM. Participants, who ranged in…

Parent and child joint book reading (JBR) characteristics and parent facilitative language techniques (FLTs) were investigated in two groups of parents and their young children; children with normal hearing (NH; "n" = 60) and children with hearing loss (HL; "n" = 45). Parent-child dyads were videotaped during JBR interactions,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between a teacher report measure, the Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL; Dickinson et al. in "Teacher rating of oral language and literacy (TROLL): a research-based tool." Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,…

This dissertation describes the details of a study that explored what possible effects might occur in the area of oral language skills when kindergarten-age children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are exposed to sophisticated vocabulary and are engaged actively through dramatization and movement with a school's existing literacy curriculum. A…

Providing unbiased data concerning the outcomes of particular intervention methods is imperative if professionals and parents are to assimilate information which could contribute to an "informed choice". An evaluation of Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT) was conducted using a formal assessment of spoken language as an outcome measure. Spoken…

Purpose: The authors examined the benefits of younger cochlear implantation, longer cochlear implant use, and greater pre-implant aided hearing to spoken language at 3.5 and 4.5 years of age. Method: Language samples were obtained at ages 3.5 and 4.5 years from 76 children who received an implant by their 3rd birthday. Hierarchical linear modeling…

Purpose: The major purpose of this study was to provide information about expected spoken language skills of preschool-age children who are deaf and who use a cochlear implant. A goal was to provide "benchmarks" against which those skills could be compared, for a given age at implantation. We also examined whether parent-completed…