This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention…

This article seeks to contribute new perspectives to the ontology and epistemology of preschool science education by exploring the idea of using everyday verbs, rather than nouns, to discern possibilities for science learning in preschool. Herein, the author merges empirical examples from preschools with findings from research on children's noun…

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the trajectory of Spanish article accuracy in Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) from preschool to first grade, addressing the need for longitudinal data on the variability of Spanish grammatical skills in DLLs in English immersion classrooms. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted…

Dialogic reading during shared book reading between adults and children is an effective way to promote vocabulary acquisition. However, there is limited research on what strategies parents are spontaneously using during book reading sessions, which are important to understand for optimizing parent training in dialogic reading. The current study…

A repeated acquisition (RA) design was used to compare the effectiveness of research-based instruction embedded in repeated storybook reading facilitated by an adult or tablet application (app) on the vocabulary knowledge of six preschool children. All participants selected scored below the 40th percentile on the "Preschool Language…

Purpose: Knowledge of verb development in typically developing bilingual preschoolers may inform clinicians about verb accuracy rates during the 1st 2 years of English instruction. This study aimed to investigate tensed verb accuracy in 2 assessment contexts in 4- and 5-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual preschoolers. Method: The sample included…

Interactive book reading (IBR) has proven effective for increasing children's lexicons with most of the results based on students' learning of nouns. Little is known about the application of IBR to instructional verbs (i.e., words used during the instruction of academic content). To address this gap, 122 prekindergarten children were recruited…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

In this pilot study, we examine the suitability of materials for a vocabulary intervention designed to influence the amount of complex syntax teachers use in at-risk preschool classrooms. Six Head Start classrooms were assigned to one of two vocabulary interventions: a condition using cognitive verbs, which are biased toward complex syntax (e.g.…

Well-developed lexical representations are important for reading comprehension, but there have been no prior attempts to track growth in the depth of knowledge of particular words. This article examines increases in depth of vocabulary knowledge in 4-5-year-old preschool students (n = 240) who participated in a vocabulary intervention that taught…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

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…

Purpose: The intent of this study was to examine the longitudinal morpho-syntactic progression of children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) grouped according to Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) scores. Methods: Thirty-seven children separated into four clusters were assessed in their pre-kindergarten and Grade 1 years. Cluster 1 were children with…

Subscribing to Systemic Functional Linguistics approach, this paper examines aspects of decontextualised language, such as classification and definitions, in Greek pre-school instructional contexts. Following the assumption that such decontextualised uses are considered critical to the transition from commonsense to educational knowledge, we…

This volume offers a comprehensive, up-to-date, empirical and methodological view over the new scenarios and environments for language teaching and learning recently emerged (e.g. blended learning, e-learning, ubiquitous learning, social learning, autonomous learning or lifelong learning), and also over some of the new approaches to language…