Students from refugee background enter Australian schools to pursue their educational goal. Though most do well academically, a few encounter educational difficulties and struggle to acquire English language. An exploratory qualitative case study approach was used to investigate factors contributing to poor development of English language and…

Can early childhood education (ECE) support the societal language development of children from linguistically diverse backgrounds? This study examined how existing variation in classroom interaction quality (CLASS Pre-K), classroom composition (percentages of children from low-income backgrounds and dual language learners [DLLs]), and duration of…

Purpose: This was an investigation of the dimensionality of oral and written language to test the hypothesis that a two-factor model with sound/word and sentence/discourse language levels would best fit language and literacy data for a population-based sample in the school-age years. Method: A stratified secondary data set of 1,500 participants…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

Visual attention and active engagement during shared book reading are important for facilitating emergent literacy learning during the preschool years. Children on the autism spectrum often show difficulties in language and literacy development, yet research investigating potential indicators of shared book reading engagement, including visual…

Effective communication requires an understanding of the interlocutor's perspective. Being able to infer someone else's knowledge about a situation is a critical skill in any communication and social interaction. These abilities are part of Theory of Mind (ToM) skills and are known to be impaired in Down syndrome (DS). It therefore makes sense to…

Emotional reactivity (e.g. explosive outbursts, tantrums) is a common but understudied challenge for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Prior research has relied primarily on questionnaire data or observations of very young children. The current study coded emotional reactivity and recovery during a series of standardized frustration tasks…

The present study examined relations between Theory of Mind (ToM) understanding and social competence among school-age Latino children. Participants included 62 children ages 6-12 years. Picture vocabulary was assessed via a standardized language survey, and ToM assessed via Happé's [(1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine whether young learners of varying reading and spelling performance, identified in Grade 2, can be distinguished retrospectively from kindergarten, based on their growth profiles in cognitive (planning, attention, working memory--WM) and linguistic (phonological--PA and naming speed--RAN)…

The current study investigates the impact of the teachers' societal dominant language use within a weak version of translanguaging in early heritage language education. We explored five preschool teachers' use of English, the dominant majority language, in Tamil heritage language classes in Singapore and examined its impact on 33 children's…

Researchers studying parent-child reminiscing in the preschool years have often focused on parents' and children's elaborative talk (i.e., provision of unique details). The current study proposes a novel conceptualization of parent-child reminiscing narratives by examining 4 levels of abstraction (i.e., a continuum of literal to inferential…

This research examines the influence of educator and child expectations on children's self-regulation, early reading, and vocabulary outcomes over two time points. Thirty educators (15 early childhood educators [ECEs] and 15 teachers) and 149 kindergarten children participated in the research. The educators participated in an expectation ranking…

Based on longitudinal data (n = 338) from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) competence development (mathematics and language) of three groups with different mathematical preconditions (+/- 1 SD) were compared between age 4 to 10. Groups were composed by first measurement of mathematical achievement in pre-school age (5/6 years).…

This study examined the association between observed cognitive sensitivity (CS) during family interactions and children's receptive vocabulary for older and younger siblings. Maternal and sibling CS was considered and associations were explored at the family-wide (between-family) and child-specific (within-family) levels of analysis. The…

Metaphor development in conjunction with verbal intelligence and linguistic competence in middle childhood and at the transition to early adolescence was investigated. 298 individuals between seven and ten years (chronological age) who attended grades two-four (mental age) were tested for metaphor processing by the Metaphoric Triads Task, for…