In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley published findings that young children from low-income backgrounds will hear 32 million fewer words than their more affluent peers by the time they turn four years old. Historically, this "word gap" has solely been identified as a function of socioeconomic status--or more specifically, family income.…

Infants and toddlers who live in poverty are more likely to experience developmental delays or disabilities and less likely to access early intervention (EI) services. The federal initiative Race to the Top--Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) was designed to increase access to high quality early learning programs for children at risk for…

Existing research suggests a need for an intervention that can accelerate vocabulary acquisition for young children at-risk due to poverty. An adapted alternating treatments design was used to examine the effects of Dialogic Reading and Activity-Based Intervention (ABI) on participants' production of target words. Participants were three…