Purpose: Although a global picture exists of teachers' voice demands in general, few studies have compared specific groups of teachers to determine whether some are more at risk than others. This study compared the vocal loadings of kindergarten and elementary school teachers; professional and nonprofessional vocal load were determined for…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to evaluate hypotheses that early sociocognition will predict later social communication and early phonology will predict later morphosyntax in clinically referred preschoolers. Method: Participants were 108 children ages 9-11 years who had been referred to clinical services with concerns about language at…

Purpose: To investigate a model of language development for nonverbal preschool-age children learning to communicate with augmentative or alternative communication. Method: Ninety-three preschool children with intellectual disabilities were assessed at Time 1, and 82 of these children were assessed 1 year later, at Time 2. The outcome variable was…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to compare vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking in large samples of Korean and U.S. children ages 18-35 months. Method: Data for 2,191 Korean children (211 children recruited "offline" through preschools, and 1,980 recruited "online" via the Internet) and 274 U.S.…

Purpose: In this study, the authors evaluated the efficacy of a Spanish-English versus English-only vocabulary intervention for dual-language learners (DLLs) with language impairment compared to mathematics intervention groups and typically developing controls with no intervention. Further, in this study the authors also examined whether the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…

Purpose: The effects of animation on transparency, name agreement, and identification of graphic symbols for verbs and prepositions were evaluated in preschoolers of 3 age groups. Methods: A mixed-group design was used; in each age group, half of the children were randomly allocated to 1 of 2 orders of symbol formats. The 52 children were asked to…

Purpose: To investigate whether phonological or semantic encoding cues improved the fast mapping or word learning performance of preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) or typical development (TD) and whether performance varied for words containing high- or low-frequency sublexical sequences that named familiar or unfamiliar objects.…

Purpose: Emotional regulation of preschool children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) was assessed through use of a disappointing gift (DG) procedure (P. M. Cole, 1986; C. Saarni, 1984, 1992). Method: Participants consisted of 16 CWS and CWNS (11 boys and 5 girls in each talker group) who were 3 to 5 years of age. After…

Purpose: Letter knowledge is a key aspect of children's language development, yet relatively little research has aimed to understand the nature of lowercase letter knowledge. We considered 4 hypotheses about children's lowercase letter knowledge simultaneously--uppercase familiarity, uppercase-lowercase similarity, own-name advantage, and…

Purpose: Some children with speech sound disorders (SSD) have difficulty with literacy-related skills, particularly phonological awareness (PA). This study investigates the PA skills of preschoolers with SSD by using a regression model to evaluate the degree to which PA can be concurrently predicted by types of speech sound errors. Method:…

Purpose: To document the development of a new parent- and day care-administered screening instrument (the Screening Instrument for 3-Year-Olds [SI-3]) to be used in a newly implemented, educationally motivated population language screening in Denmark. The authors investigated whether the basic principles of the SI-3 were working satisfactorily and…

Purpose: The authors investigated potential relationships between traditional linguistic domains (words, grammar) in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages of young sequential bilingual preschool children. Method: Participants were 19 children, ages 2;11 (years;months) to 5;2 (M = 4;3) who began learning Hmong as the L1 from birth and English as…

Purpose: The purpose was to determine the number of semantic neighbors, namely, "semantic set size," for 88 nonobjects (J. F. Kroll & M. C. Potter, 1984) and determine how semantic set size related to other measures and age. Method: Data were collected from 82 adults and 92 preschool children in a discrete association task. The nonobjects were…

Purpose: The purpose was to determine whether semantic set size, a measure of the number of semantic neighbors, influenced word learning, and whether the influence of semantic set size was broad, showing effects on multiple measures both during and after learning. Method: Thirty-six preschool children were exposed to 10 nonobjects, varying in…