COVID-19 impacted all aspects of children's lives. Research showed that teachers were most concerned about Communication and Language, and Personal, Social and Emotional Development, two of the three Prime Areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage which underpin all learning. The pandemic had a significant impact on early years settings.…

Creating an environment suitable for language acquisition through shared reading significantly contributes to improving a child's language development and parent-child relationship. Reading in an interactive way, such as dialogic reading, is favorable. Nevertheless, dialogic reading is designed for children above the age of two and shared reading…

For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

Parity is one source of automatic reinforcement that increases the probability of verbal behavior that conforms to models provided by the verbal community. Parity as a conditioned reinforcer could explain the acquisition of grammar in the absence of direct, explicit reinforcement. This possibility has been explored in previous research on…

Children's speech development begins in infancy. The pattern of this development has been explored in studies over a number of years using a range of research methodology and approaches to investigation. A systematic review of the existing literature was carried out to determine the collective contribution of this literature to our understanding…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the time course of vocal development in infants and toddlers with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs; bilateral CI group) who are acquiring Finnish and to compare their progress to that of infants with normal hearing and typical development (TD group). Method: Five thousand nine hundred…

Purpose: A recent approach to identifying early markers of risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been to study infants who have an older sibling with ASD. These infants are at heightened risk (HR) for ASD and for other developmental difficulties, and even those who do not receive an eventual ASD diagnosis manifest a high degree of…

This paper presents the effects of using digital games on improving language learning in Tanzanian preschools. A gamified learning prototype system was developed for making alphabetical sound articulation more engaging and fun. The study was conducted with twelve preschools in Tanzania. The results revealed that preschoolers' learning performance…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the passive. The apparent cross-linguistic delay of the verbal passive compared to other constructions suggests children's knowledge is somehow restricted, leading some to propose the difficulty arises because of syntactic maturation (Wexler 2004, Orfitelli 2012) or because of a heavy reliance…

Purpose: Verbal short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) skills predict speech and language outcomes in children with cochlear implants (CIs) even after conventional demographic, device, and medical factors are taken into account. However, prior research has focused on single end point outcomes as opposed to the longitudinal process of…

In this study we examined early motor, vocal, and communicative development in a group of younger siblings of children diagnosed with autism (Infant Siblings). Infant Siblings and no-risk comparison later-born infants were videotaped at home with a primary caregiver each month from 5 to 14 months, with follow-up at 18 months. As a group, Infant…

Purpose: Vocalization development has not been studied thoroughly in infants with early-identified hearing loss who receive hearing aids in the 1st year of life. This study sought to evaluate the relationship between auditory sensitivity and prelinguistic vocalization patterns in infants during the babbling stage. Method: Spontaneous…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…