This dissertation study employed quantitative methods to investigate the impact of adult questioning styles on children's novel vocabulary acquisition during shared storybook reading. In an effort to examine adult qualitative variations in shared storybook readings, two experiments were conducted to assess the effect of noneliciting questions…

Twenty early childhood student educators were surveyed on their teaching practices when working with children learning English as a second language in early childhood centres in New Zealand. The bilingual and trilingual participants stated that their practices were based on their own language learning experiences, theories learned in class and…

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, [lsquo ]real[rsquo ] two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the…

Letter sound knowledge, which, together with phonological awareness, is highly predictive of pre-school children's reading acquisition, derives from children's knowledge of their associated letter names and the phonological patterns of those names. In this study of 66 monolingual pre-school children we examined whether phonological patterns…

This study investigates the learning exchange between three- to six-year-old children and their grandparents, in Sylheti/Bengali-speaking families of Bangladeshi origin and monolingual English-speaking families living in east London. The following concepts from sociocultural theory are applied to this new area of intergenerational learning:…

Two studies addressed the role of representation ability and control of attention on solutions to an appearance-reality task based on two types of objects, real and representational. In Study 1, 67 preschool children (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) solved appearancereality problems and executive processing tasks. There was an interaction between object…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Method: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15 [years;months.days]),…

In the United States, more than 2 million children in Grades pre-K through 6 speak Spanish as their primary language. Approximately 50% of these students receive academic instruction in Spanish. This tutorial provides research-based recommendations for presenting phonological awareness tasks to children who receive literacy instruction in Spanish.…

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different…

This study explores influences on bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) performance in English, examining the role of language of instruction and vocabulary. English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners and first graders receiving either English or Spanish literacy instruction were assessed in English PA and in…

A major challenge facing the prekindergarten-12 education system in the United States is the fact that as the population changes, the particular needs of children change with it. One of the largest demographic shifts over the last ten years is the sharp increase in the number of students in public schools who speak English as their second language…

This paper identifies: (a) discourses that shape immigrant parents' and early childhood educators' views of young children's bilingual development, and (b) ways in which these discourses are manifested in the everyday lives of immigrant parents as well as in the practices of early childhood educators. The findings of a study in a mid-size Canadian…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…

Purpose: This study evaluates the extent to which bilingual children produce the same or overlapping responses on tasks assessing semantic skills in each of their languages and whether classification analysis based on monolingual or conceptual scoring can accurately classify the semantic development of typically developing (TD) bilingual children.…

Thirty middle- to upper middle-class monolingual Dutch speaking families consisting of at least a mother and a father completed the Infant Form "Words and Gestures" of the Dutch adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for the same child at 1;1. Considerable inter- and intrafamily variation emerged in how two (or three)…