The goal of England's Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) is to support early communication and literacy skills and to support parents as their children's first educators through both home- and group-based programs. The program is currently offered to children under 5 years of age and their families in a disadvantaged area of Oxford. This…

This guide is comprised of activities designed to assist parents in facilitating the language development of typically developing children or children with communication problems, to assist teachers and child care providers in effectively communicating with preverbal children, and to assist speech/language professionals in including preverbal…

This brief paper summarizes warning signs of learning disabilities in preschool children, elementary school children, and secondary school children. It notes that learning disabilities are presumed to arise from dysfunctions in the brain resulting in significant difficulties in perceiving information, processing and/or remembering information,…

Asserting that early education is the most cost-effective way to decrease the number of unskilled adults in the future, this report discusses the need to promote language and literacy learning in young children as a way to bolster the country's future workforce. Sections of the report discuss: (1) "Child Care: The Perfect Place to Develop…

Matched groups of day-care and home-reared infants were assessed at 3.5 years old for aspects of emotional and language development. The data suggest that attendance in infant day care did not adversely affect the children's overall emotional or language development (Author/DB)

Parents are urged to provide a superior education for their preschool children by encouraging the development of the first language in the home and by teaching the young child to read in at least one of his languages before going to school. (PMJ)

This study examined the development of causal expressions in children's discourse from two to three years of age. Linguistic, contextual, and pragmatic influences on language development were the major factors considered. (CM)

This book reports on the extensive longitudinal study of children's language development by B. Hart and T. Risley. Their detailed recording of children's language experience over the first three years of life provides a valuable example of assessing environmental quality. Implications for improving day care and academic achievement are discussed.…

This study explored effects of training 25 mothers to administer focused intervention to teach specific target words to their toddlers with expressive vocabulary delays. Following treatment, mothers' language input was slower, less complex, and more focused. The children used more target words, more words during play, and had larger vocabularies…

This article describes a functional approach to language intervention that uses storybook reading contexts with preschool children who exhibit delayed phonological development. Oral scaffolding techniques, including discussions of narrative structure and content words, provide the modeling and metalinguistic descriptions typically used in…

A study analyzed the narratives of 24 predominately English-speaking Latino children (ages 3-5) enrolled in a federally subsidized preschool. The length of narrative did not differ significantly by age. However, older children produced stories that contained longer sentences, a higher proportion of grammatically acceptable sentences, and more…

The economic efficiency of alternative types of intervention was investigated with language-impaired preschool children. Forty children were assigned to one of four groups: home-based intervention, center-based intervention, both center- and home-based intervention, and no treatment. The home-based program was more economically efficient based on…

Children (n=118) with severe/profound hearing loss were assessed on language and social skills when aged three-five years and again three-four years later. The study failed to obtain evidence of lasting gains associated with intervention during infancy, intensified programing, or direct instruction by parents. (Author/JDD)

This study investigated "redirects," a procedure in which a teacher redirects a child's communication from the teacher to a peer, as a means to facilitate initiations to peers. Use with four preschool boys with specific language impairment found that most of the redirected initiations received conversational responses from peers. Generalization to…

Discusses whether developmental delays can be the unintended consequence of developmentally inappropriate preschool teacher and staff practices. Describes the interplay between language and knowledge in early childhood. Includes a table that specifies the child's ability to take in information from language input through five developmental stages…