This twin study examined the relative contributions of genes and environment on 2nd language reading acquisition of Chinese-speaking children learning English. We examined whether specific skills-visual word recognition, receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and speech discrimination-in the 1st and 2nd languages have…

Retrospective studies indicate 2 major classes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) onset: early and later, after a period of relatively healthy development. This prospective, longitudinal study examined social, language, and motor trajectories in 235 children with and without a sibling with autism, ages 6-36 months. Children were grouped as: ASD…

Preschoolers with severe autism and minimal speech were assigned either a discrete trial or a naturalistic language treatment, and parents of all participants also received parent responsiveness training. After 12 weeks, both groups showed comparable improvement in number of spoken words produced, on average. Approximately half the children in…

This article describes a department-coordinated Facebook group for psychology students and graduates. An evaluation of the postings in the past year by the group, with 900 members, showed that the group averaged 2.5 postings per day. The most common types of postings involved (1) information about recent research findings, (2) information about…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

Background: It is recognized that children from areas associated with socioeconomic disadvantage are at an increased risk of delayed language development. However, so far research has focused mainly on young children and there has been little investigation into language development in adolescence. Aims: To investigate the language abilities of…

Research Findings: This study compared the effects of content-based shared book-reading instruction versus an explicit vocabulary-only condition on the vocabulary development of preschool dual language learners (DLLs). Using shared book reading as the mode of instruction, we randomly assigned 48 bilingual preschool teachers and 281…

This study used a nonequivalent group design to evaluate the impact of an emergent literacy intervention on preschool children identified with early reading difficulties. Thirty-five children were compared with 39 typically developing classroom peers on various reading measures in a community-based project--"Mission I'm Possible" (MIP),…

Poor language skills can have a negative effect on a developing child if not identified early. Current strategies to identify families with children who may need additional support are limited, and may not detect child language problems before they become entrenched. The present study explores observed indices of parental language as a means of…

The purpose of this study was to compare a group of recently diagnosed bilingual-exposed children with autism (n = 20) aged 24-2 months with a matched group of monolingual-exposed children with autism (n = 40). The groups were matched with regard to chronological age at the time of language assessment and nonverbal IQ score, then compared with…

Dialogic Reading (DR) is a form of interactive shared book reading which promotes children's active participation in reading. Previous studies have demonstrated that DR positively affects young children's literacy development. This small-scale study extends existing DR research to all-male dyads to examine whether DR has a greater impact on boys'…

The purpose of this study was to assess changes in children's language skills and parenting stress following participation in the Parent-Child Mother Goose Program (PCMGP). The intervention group consisted of 29 parents (age range 24 to 43 years, "M" = 33.5, SD = 4.1) and 30 children (18 females and 12 males) with ages ranging from 1 to…

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the state language of West Bengal and Tripura and also spoken in some parts of Assam. Bangla is the official language of Bangladesh. With nearly 230 million speakers (Wikipedia 2010), Bangla is one of the most spoken language in the world. Bangla language is the most commonly used language in West…

In this study, we performed a fine grained analysis of writing by children with a specific language impairment (SLI) and examined the contribution of oral language, phonological short-term memory (STM), nonverbal ability, and word reading to three writing constructs (productivity, complexity and accuracy). Forty-six children with SLI were compared…

Purpose: In this study, the authors evaluated the efficacy of a Spanish-English versus English-only vocabulary intervention for dual-language learners (DLLs) with language impairment compared to mathematics intervention groups and typically developing controls with no intervention. Further, in this study the authors also examined whether the…