This study followed the development of Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) proficiency in 31 deaf bimodal bilingual children (kindergarten through Primary 6) over two years. The Hong Kong Sign Language Elicitation Tool (HKSL-ET) was used at three time points to elicit the production of agreement, classifier, modal, negation, and wh-question structures.…

Purpose: Children with autism are found to have delayed and heterogeneous gesture abilities. It is important to understand the growth of gesture abilities and the underlying factors affecting its growth. Addressing these issues can help to design effective intervention programs. Method: Thirty-five Chinese-speaking preschoolers with autism…

Studies of language development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been primarily focused on the influence of child-based factors such as autism traits, IQ, and initial language skills. Yet the findings of these studies are inconclusive. There has, moreover, been little research compared the relative influences of child-based…

Purpose: Cantonese lexical tone awareness is closely associated with 1st language Cantonese vocabulary knowledge, but its role in 2nd language English vocabulary knowledge was unclear. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and, if so, how Cantonese lexical tone awareness contributes to English expressive vocabulary knowledge in Hong…

Purpose: We report on a replicated single-case design study that measured the feasibility of an expressive vocabulary intervention for three Cantonese-speaking toddlers with small expressive lexicons relative to their age. The aim was to assess the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic feasibility of an intervention method developed for…

Social mastery motivation and parental response are important correlates of children's vocabulary and self-regulation skills, but little research has examined their relationships collectively. This study investigated the direct relationships among social mastery motivation (active interaction and positive affect frequencies), parental response,…

The present study investigated gender differences in social mastery motivation, vocabulary knowledge, behavioral self-regulation, and socioemotional skills and examined the relationships among this knowledge and these skills by gender. Participants were 134 Chinese children (68 boys, M age = 3.80; 66 girls, M age = 3.89) and their parents…

The study seeks to understand the relation between preschool children's mode of participation and negotiation strategies during play and their theory of mind (ToM) development in the Hong Kong context. Forty-two 5-year-old children were recruited. Their emotional and cognitive ToMs were assessed along with expressive language ability. Children's…

The present study explored the home literacy environment for Chinese ESL kindergarteners and examined the relationships between home literacy practices and language and literacy skills. Ninety Hong Kong Chinese ESL kindergarteners were assessed for English vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge and word reading. Their parents…

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction…

This paper reports a longitudinal investigation into the productive vocabulary development in the written Chinese of the Cantonese-speaking elementary children in Hong Kong. Data gathering took place using two vocabulary tests which selected prescriptive vocabulary from the textbooks and the 2007 Vocabulary List. The two assessment tests also…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…

Investigated the interface of form and function in the acquisition of negation in Cantonese-speaking children. Data--from the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus--were longitudinal spontaneous samples of eight children aged 1.5 to 3.8 years. Main issues in the study were the sequence of emergence of negative markers and the acquisition of 11…