This study explored the connection between children's language skills, creativity, and play. The participants were 151 (76 boys and 75 girls) primarily middle-income, European American children. Ages ranged from 4 to 6 years. This project employed mixed methods approaches. Children engaged in several tasks. These included: creating a story about…

Purpose: Children's vocabulary and syntactic skills vary upon school entry in depth and breadth, persistently influencing academic performance, including reading. Enhancing early communicative abilities through multisensory, playful, and conversational experiences is essential and will benefit children's school readiness. This study investigated…

Strong oral language skills are foundational for literacy development and begin before a child enters formal schooling. Oral language development has been related to pretend play abilities in children. Children, particularly those from disadvantaged areas, who enter school with low pretend play levels and oral language abilities, are at risk for…

The aim of this study was to examine classification accuracy for the expressive language skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in terms of object play and imitation scores. A total of 61 children with ASD, who were 2.0-5.11 years old, were included in the study. In order to collect data play and imitation assessment tasks which…

Purpose: Estimating the sequential associations between educators' and children's talk during language learning interactions requires careful consideration of factors that may impact measurement stability and resultant inferences. This research note will describe a preliminary study that used generalizability theory to understand the contribution…

Objective: This study was designed to produce a new parent-report measure, the Diagnostic Receptive Expressive Assessment of Mandarin-Infant Toddler Assessment of Communication and Language (DREAM-IT) in order to provide norms for the developmental skills of children aged 0-36 months in four areas: expressive language, receptive language,…

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) in Sri Lanka have inadequate access to early amplification and language stimulation. As a result, they are at risk of impoverished language development: spoken language and sign language. Thirty DHH children who use Sri Lankan sign language between the ages of 4;4-7;2 years from three classrooms of a…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) often exhibit delays in cognitive and linguistic development. In response to the increasing number of culturally and linguistically diverse populations with disabilities in the United States and need for evidence-based interventions with cultural adaptations, this study examined the effects of enhanced milieu…

The current study examined how mothers' production of four types of internal state words at multiple ages across the second year in a free play context was related to their infants' acquisition of those words. Twenty-nine mother-infant dyads were videotaped for 18 minutes during free play when infants were 13 and 17 months old. Mothers' total and…

Purpose: Children with autism are found to have delayed and heterogeneous gesture abilities. It is important to understand the growth of gesture abilities and the underlying factors affecting its growth. Addressing these issues can help to design effective intervention programs. Method: Thirty-five Chinese-speaking preschoolers with autism…

This study was intended to examine the relationship between children's shyness and play behaviour during peer play, and the moderating effect of the level of children's language development. Participants were 229 South Korean children aged 48-53 months. The results of the study are as follows. Children's shyness was negatively associated with…

Purpose: This longitudinal study assessed continuity and stability of productive language (vocabulary and grammar) and discourse features (turn-taking; asking and responding to questions) during mother-child play. Method: Parent-child language use in 119 Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children at two ages (M = 2.5 and 3.6…

This study examined the connection between young children's social play, creativity, storytelling, and language abilities. Participants were 56 primarily European American preschool children. First, to assess creativity we asked children to draw several pictures. Children created stories about their pictures during the creative process. Second,…

Parents are the logical intervention agents for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The early start Denver model (ESDM) is a promising early intervention approach for children with ASD that can be implemented by parents. This study evaluated the effects of training parents in the use of the ESDM. We used a non-concurrent multiple…

Few interventions exist for school-aged minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Even though play skills are associated with children's production of language, few studies have focused on play for minimally verbal children. Fifty-eight minimally verbal children with ASD received a naturalistic developmental behavioral…