In this study, the researchers explored the impact of reading aloud on language acquisition for 12 infants and toddlers (6-22 months old) attending a preschool located in South Florida. The research team included university professors, a preschool director and two preschool teachers. A teacher assistant read a selected picture book to each child…

Purpose: This study was conducted in a large Midwestern metropolitan area to examine the language environments at home and in center-based childcare for young children who are living in poverty. We compared child language use and exposure in the home and childcare settings using extended observations with automated Language Environment Analysis to…

This study aims to investigate the language-learning environment and educational language practices in four toddler groups measured as high quality on the 'Listening and Talking' subscale in the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale -- Revised. The empirical data are taken from a larger fieldwork conducted in four child groups, and comprise 98…

This practical resource explains brain development from prenatal to age 8 with suggestions for activities educators and caregivers can use to foster children's cognitive growth. The authors begin with the basics of brain development, and the issues that affect it, and then provide information specific to infant, toddler, preschool, and…

Child-directed speech (CDS), which can help children learn new words, has been rigorously studied among infants and parents in home settings. Yet, far less is known about the CDS that teachers use in classrooms with toddlers and children's responses, an important question because many toddlers, particularly in high-need communities, attend…

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) helps educators identify children not responding to intervention, individualize instruction, and monitor response to intervention in multitiered systems of support (MTSS). More prevalent in K-12 special education, MTSS practices are emerging in early childhood. In previous reports, we described the Making Online…

Data-driven decision making (DDDM) helps educators identify children not responding to intervention, individualize instruction, and monitor response to intervention in multitiered systems of support (MTSS). More prevalent in K-12 special education, MTSS practices are emerging in early childhood. In previous reports, we described the Making Online…

In this pilot study, we ask whether repeated storybook reading is also beneficial for word learning in children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). We compared 3-year-old German learning children diagnosed with SLI to typically developing children matched on age and socioeconomic status (SES). One week later, children with SLI…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to estimate the separate effects of the starting age, program duration, and persistence of impacts of early childhood education programs on children's cognitive and achievement outcomes. It concentrates on studies published before the wide scale penetration of state-pre-K programs. Specifically, data are…

While most early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs taken to scale in the United States have served socially disadvantaged 3- to 5-years-olds, Norway scaled up universal ECEC from age 1. We investigated the consequences of Norway's universal ECEC scale-up for children's early language skills, exploiting variation in ECEC coverage across…

Matrix training is a systematic teaching approach that can facilitate generalized language. Specific responses are taught that result in the emergence of untrained responses. This type of training facilitates the use of generalized language in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study used a matrix training procedure with a toddler…

This article focuses on educational language practices as described by preschool teachers in Norwegian kindergartens in groups consisting of one- to three-year-old children. Research indicates a relationship between high-quality childcare and language development, yet there is a need for more research on educational practices in high-quality…

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

Building on extensive feedback from the field as well as vigorous new research on how best to support infant and toddler development and learning, the authors have revised and updated the widely used "Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale." ITERS-3 is the next-generation assessment tool for use in center-based child care programs for…