The authors believe that exposure to cultural diversity may force children (or even adults) to form new neural connections in the brain to be able to sufficiently interpret meaning in things to which they are not accustomed. Once formed, these new neural connections may be at one's permanent disposal to assist in a myriad of potential cognitive…

High illiteracy rates among the Argentine deaf population, even after long years of schooling, point to the need to revise certain approaches to deaf literacy, particularly in school settings. Qualitative change in deaf literacy requires the use of multiple conceptual tools if learners are to be able to tackle its complexity without reductionism…

The ability to define a word with accuracy and precision is an important skill that has been associated with academic achievement. This study investigated the feasibility of conducting a lesson on formal word definitions to improve children's definitional production. The participants were 18 children in grade 4 (mean age: 9 years; 8 months) who…

An experiment examined whether metalinguistic awareness involving the detection of semantic ambiguity can be taught, and whether this instruction improves students' reading comprehension. Lower SES third graders from a variety of cultural backgrounds (M = 8 yr. 7 mo., N = 46) were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Those receiving…

This study examined the preschool predictors of elementary school narrative writing skills. The sample included 65 typically developing African American children, ranging in age from 5.0 to 5.5 years, and was 44.6% male. Targeted preschool predictors included measures of phonological processing, core language abilities, prereading skills, and…

To evaluate whether performance differences between good and poor readers relate to reading-specific cognitive factors that result from engaging in reading activities and other experiential factors, the authors gave students in Grades 4 and 6 a perceptual identification test of words not only drawn from their personal lexicon but also varying in…

Few studies have explored the development of the gesture-speech system after the two-word stage. Aim of the present study is to examine developmental changes in speech and gesture use, in the context of a simple naming task. Fifty-one children (age range: 2;3-7;6) were divided into five age groups and requested to name pictures representing…

We investigated the initial development of reading and spelling in European Portuguese. First-graders, tested in February and June, had to read and spell words and pseudowords. In February there were regularity and graphemic complexity effects, indicating that these children relied on grapheme-phoneme conversion. The lexicality effect found in…

The study investigated reading in four African languages that use either syllabic Ge'ez (Tigrinya and Tigre languages) or alphabetic Latin scripts (Kunama and Saho). A sample of 385 Grade 1 children were given letter knowledge, word reading, and spelling tasks to investigate differences at the script and language levels. Results showed that the…

Some students enter the world of mathematics with a disadvantage. The authors explored the causes for this from a language-processing perspective. They were particularly concerned with students with potential learning disabilities or specific language impairments. They also explored the role of language-mediated instruction in creating an…

As a group, children with hearing loss demonstrate delays in language development relative to their peers with normal hearing. Early intervention has a profound impact on language outcomes in children with hearing loss. Data examining the relationship between degree of hearing loss and language outcomes are variable. Two approaches are used in the…

Purpose: This study examined the development of timing characteristics in early spontaneous speech of children who were later identified as having reading disability (RD). Method: Child-adult play sessions were recorded longitudinally at 2 and 3 years of age in 27 children, most of whom were at high familial risk for RD. For each speaking turn,…

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of phonology, orthography, and morphology to biliteracy acquisition in 78 Grade 1 Chinese-English bilingual children. Conceptually comparable measures in English and Chinese tapping phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness were administered. Word reading skill in English and…

Dutch bisyllabic words containing open and closed syllables are particularly difficult to spell for children. What kind of support in spelling exercises improves the spelling of these words the most? Two extensions of a commonly used dictation exercise were tested: less skilled spellers in grade 2 (n = 50; 7 years and 10 months) either received…

We built an NLP system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary texts produced by pupils…