Merging the literatures of how to enhance young children's vocabulary development and how to improve learning through play, this study tested two vocabulary teaching protocols on at-risk preschool children: Explicit Instructional Vocabulary Protocol (EIVP) and shortened EIVP and a play session (EIVP + Play). From a group of 118 lowest-performing…

We studied 52 parent-child dyads reading an alphabet book to examine the nature of children's miscues and parents' feedback, and whether miscues and feedback were related to each other and to preliteracy skills. Letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and expressive vocabulary were assessed in 5-year-old nonreaders who were also audiotaped…

The purpose of this study was to design and establish the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measures (CBMs) of vocabulary acquisition for use with preschool children. This study sought to establish the technical adequacy of two tools that can be used for measuring benchmarks of vocabulary acquisition for both native English speakers and for…

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy…

This study sought to test the most efficient representation mode with which children with hearing impairment could express a story while producing connectives indicating relations of time and of cause and effect. Using Bruner's (1973, 1986, 1990) representation stages, we tested the comparative effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) as a mode of…

Guided by Bioecological Systems Theory and Schema Theory, I investigated mothers' perceptions regarding the emotional development of their preschool children. Researchers acknowledge mothers' contributing role in influencing children's behavioral displays of emotion, but there is a dearth in the literature on mothers. emotion-related behaviors,…

Children with Down syndrome experience significant communication impairments, particularly in expressive language. Although receiving little attention in the literature, deficiencies in expressive language are likely to affect spontaneous communicative responses in children with Down syndrome. In this study, using a multiple baseline design across…

The current investigation examined whether inter-generational transfer of risk could be revealed through mothers' and preschool-aged children's expressive language, and whether continuity of risk persisted in these children's academic abilities, 3 years later. Participating families were drawn from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, a…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to investigate child impacts following implementation of a comprehensive language curriculum, the Language-Focused Curriculum (LFC; Bunce, 1995), within their preschool classrooms. As part of this larger purpose, this study identified child-level predictors of expressive language outcomes for children…

Most international adoptees (IA) have rapid catch-up of the delays common at arrival. However, it is not known whether development at arrival predicts later abilities or school readiness. Therefore, we comprehensively evaluated language, fine motor, visual reception (VR), executive function (EF), attention (ATT), and sensory skills (SS) in IA…

Research Findings: The teacher-child relationship can provide an important support to young children who exhibit developmental risk. This research studied the contribution of children's language skills, temperamentally based attributes (shyness, anger), and gender to closeness and conflict in the teacher-child relationship for 133 preschoolers…

Reading to children has been advocated as a way to enhance language and literacy skills (A. G. Bus, M. H. van IJzendoorn, & A. D. Pellegrini, 1995). However, little is known about reading with children under age 3 (K. L. Fletcher & E. Reese, 2005), particularly in at-risk samples (A. van Kleeck, 2003). In the current study of 87 primary caregivers…

This study examined linguistic recasts provided by 16 early childhood educators to preschool children learning English as a second language (EL2). Recasts are semantic and syntactic revisions of children's utterances. The educator-child interactions were filmed during book reading and play dough activities with small groups of four children, one…

Purpose: To examine the relationship between phonological processing skills prior to kindergarten entry and reading skills at the end of 1st grade, in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Method: The participants were 17 children with SSD and poor phonological processing skills (SSD-low PP), 16 children with SSD and good phonological…

Purpose: To examine the validity of the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; K. Williams, 1997) for assessing the expressive vocabulary skills of African American students. Method/Results: One hundred sixty-five African American preschool and kindergarten students were administered the EVT. The mean EVT score for these African American students was…