Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

Background: The majority of children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience challenges in functional communication from a young age. A pivotal aspect of functional communication is language comprehension. A variety of classification systems and questionnaires are available to classify and describe functional communication skills in children with CP.…

Given the importance of writing for academic achievement, this study aimed to understand how early oral language contributes to later writing skills. The first objective was to determine if preschool language skills were associated with high school writing, and if so, whether they contributed directly or indirectly through school age language. The…

Purpose: This article explored the predictive values of three main language delay (LD) trajectories (i.e., persistent, late onset, and transient) across 3-5 years on poor literacy at 8 years. Additionally, the effect of gender was assessed, using both gender-neutral and gender-specific thresholds. Method: The data comprised mother-reported…

Children use language structures as a basis for learning how to read. Therefore, literacy learning for young children must incorporate the child's personal use of oral language. It is their personal oral language that supports them as they attempt new concepts and become better readers. Because of the important role that oral language plays in a…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

International studies have documented large effects of SES on oral language competence and researchers have suggested that differences in oral language competence at school entry may be one factor contributing to educational disadvantage. The current study made use of data provided by the Growing Up in Ireland survey in order to quantify the…

Rejection by peers has devastating effects on children's social-cognitive development. As language difficulties have been found to be one of the underlying causes of peer rejection, the present study focused on the relation between these two variables. Specifically, this study was the first to test a hypothesized model connecting children's level…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the concurrent relationships between selected teacher-rated executive function (EF) and a comprehensive array of emergent literacy skills in preschool children after adjusting for targeted covariates including at-risk status. The sample comprised 114 three-year-olds who were attending Head Start…

Young children's oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was…

Purpose: Language is a multidimensional construct from prior to the beginning of formal schooling to near the end of elementary school. The primary goals of this study were to identify the dimensionality of language and to determine whether this dimensionality was consistent in children with typical language development from preschool through 5th…

We used multidimensional item response theory to test the internal structure of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening in Spanish for Preschool and test for item parameter drift. The measure is aligned with the simple view of reading, which defines reading as consisting of two equally important dimensions: decoding and language…

This study examined the relations between receptive language development and other developmental domains of preschoolers from low-income families, through an inter-cultural perspective involving the United States and Turkey. A total of 471 children and their caregivers participated in Turkey, while 287 participated in the United States. Children's…