This study used longitudinal productivity criteria to establish the phonetic skill of 20 children (followed from 9 to 16 months). The number of specific consonants produced consistently across the months predicted referential lexical use at 16 months. Prior use of at least two supraglottal consonants characterized the children achieving…

This study examined possible relationships between young children's prelinguistic communication behaviors and subsequent (12 months later) expressive and receptive language outcomes. Results indicated that rate of intentional nonverbal communication initially was a predictor of spontaneous word productions later. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

This study compared the object naming, object recognition, reading, and spelling abilities of 22 adults, half with written language difficulties and half without. Significant positive relationships were obtained between object naming ability and reading ability, object naming and spelling, and reading and spelling performance. Results suggest that…

A study involving 113 children (ages 24-37 months) with hearing impairments found expressive vocabulary was related to the child's age, the age of identification of the child's hearing loss (before or after 6 months), the child's cognitive quotient, and the presence or absence of one or more additional disabilities. (Contains extensive…

Fifty-eight toddlers with developmental delays participated in a 12-month longitudinal study of the relationship between prelinguistic representational ability and later expressive vocabulary. Results indicated that representational play was a significant predictor of later expressive vocabulary, but vocabulary comprehension was not. (Author/DB)

A study involving 205 children from the Danish island of Bornholm found significant paths from early language abilities at age 3 through expressive and receptive language in kindergarten via language awareness in kindergarten and word decoding in grade 2 to sentence reading in grades 3 and 4. (Author/CR)

This study, with 53 Mexican-American infants, found that five predictors accounted for approximately 35 percent of the variance in receptive language at 12 and 22 months with average parental generation from Mexico (acculturation) and infant visual recognition memory accounting for 14 and 15 percent of the variance, respectively. No predictors…

Examined contributions of dimensions of maternal responsiveness to timing of milestones in early expressive language development. Found that maternal responsiveness at 9 and 13 months predicted timing of language milestones over and above children's observed behaviors. Responsiveness at 13 months was a stronger predictor of timing than…

Development of English- and Spanish-reading skills was explored in a sample of 251 Spanish-speaking English-language learners from kindergarten through Grade 2. Word identification and reading comprehension developed at a normal rate based on monolingual norms for Spanish- and English-speaking children, but English oral language lagged…

Predictive relations were examined between measures of 20 mothers' behavioural and verbal general and specific responsiveness and intrusive and supportive directiveness and their children's subsequent expressive vocabularies during three developmental periods with endpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the second year: 0;10 to 1;1, 1;1 to…

Children and adolescents with Down syndrome show an emerging profile of speech and language characteristics that is typical of the syndrome (Chapman & Hesketh, 2000; Chapman, 2003; Abbeduto & Chapman, 2005) and different from typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age, including expressive language deficits relative to…

This study tested the predictive validity of the Communication Composite of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales with 58 children (ages 17 to 34 months) functioning at the prelinguistic stage of language development. Evaluation of expressive vocabulary 1 year later found that the Communication Composite and all tested clusters were…

A study analyzed the language development of 200 children at 14, 24, 30, and 42 months and assessed their symbolic play at 14 months. Children from families with dyslexia (n=103) had lower maximum sentence length at 2 years and object naming and inflectional morphology skills at 3.5 years. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

A study compared the expressive language abilities of 22 preschool children whose stuttering persisted and 62 who recovered over a four-year period. Findings revealed similarity in the abilities of children whose stuttering persisted as opposed to abated at all ages. All stutterers displayed abilities near or above developmental expectations. (CR)

Thirty-six children identified with small expressive vocabularies at age 20-34 months were followed up yearly and tested for expressive language skills in second grade. Of 10 possible predictor variables, only socioeconomic status and early expressive language skills predicted expressive language outcome in second grade with a slight contribution…