This study tested the relationship between prelinguistic vocalization and expressive vocabulary 1 year later in young children with mild to moderate developmental delays. Three vocalization variables were tested: rate of all vocalization, rate of vocalizations with consonants, and rate of vocalizations used interactively. The 58 toddlers in the study were 17-34 months old, not sensory impaired,...

PURPOSE The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the variability and predictors of expressive vocabulary development in children with autism and very delayed language. METHOD This study involved 35 children with autism whose initial chronological ages were between 20 and 71 months and whose initial expressive vocabularies were less than 60 words. Their expressive vocabularies were...

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 comprehension that are most severe for syntax, and, in a...

BACKGROUND The facilitating role of sleep for language learning is well-attested in adults and to a lesser extent in infants and toddlers. However, the longitudinal relationship between sleep patterns and early vocabulary development is not well understood. METHODS This study investigates how measures of sleep are related to the development of vocabulary size in infants and toddlers. Day and ...

Objectives: Reading is a language skill based on visual modality which recently is addressed as a facilitator of expressive language in children with Down syndrome. The aim was designing a whole word reading protocol and examining its effects on the language skills of children with Down syndrome. Methods: A whole word reading protocol was developed and was examined through a single-subject s...

PURPOSE To examine the validity of the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; K. Williams, 1997) for assessing the expressive vocabulary skills of African American students. METHOD/RESULTS One hundred sixty-five African American preschool and kindergarten students were administered the EVT. The mean EVT score for these African American students was 96.44 (SD = 11.42), which is not appreciably lower...

The validity of the Fundación MacArthur Inventario del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas: Palabras y Enunciados (IDHC:PE) was examined with twenty 20- and nineteen 28-month-old, typically developing, monolingual, Spanish-speaking children living in Mexico. One measure of vocabulary (number of words) and two measures of grammar (mean of the three longest utterances and grammatical complexi...

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing ...

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listeni...

Previous research shows that children's ability to estimate numbers of items using their Approximate Number System (ANS) predicts later math ability. To more closely examine the predictive role of early ANS acuity on later abilities, we assessed the ANS acuity, math ability, and expressive vocabulary of preschoolers twice, six months apart. We also administered attention and memory span tasks t...