Purpose: This study examined the effect of instruction in an active listening strategy on the communication skills of pre-service speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Method: Twenty-three pre-service SLPs in their 2nd year of graduate study received a brief strategy instruction in active listening skills. Participants were videotaped during a…

Purpose: In this response to Kamhi (2014), a sentence-focused framework is presented to help clinicians select treatment targets as part of a comprehensive approach to early grammatical intervention. Method: The literature on the relationship between lexical verbs, sentence structure, and tense/agreement morphemes is reviewed, and developmental…

Purpose: This study compared the diagnostic accuracy of a general grammaticality measure (i.e., percentage grammatical utterance; PGU) to 2 less comprehensive measures of grammaticality--a measure that excluded utterances without a subject and/or main verb (i.e., percentage sentence point; PSP) and a measure that looked only at verb tense errors…

Purpose: This study introduces an integrated multimodal intervention (IMI) and examines its effectiveness for the treatment of persistent and severe speech sound disorders (SSD) in young children. The IMI is an activity-based intervention that focuses simultaneously on increasing the "quantity" of a child's meaningful productions of target words…

Purpose: Despite strong investment in raising literacy achievement for all children, significant inequalities in literacy outcomes continue to exist among some of the world's most advanced economies. This study investigated the influence of a short, intensive period of phonological awareness (PA) instruction implemented by classroom teachers on…

Purpose: This study investigated the level of grammatical accuracy in typically developing 3-year-olds and the types of errors they produce. Method: Twenty-two 3-year-olds participated in a picture description task. The percentage of grammatical utterances was computed and error types were analyzed. Results: The mean level of grammatical accuracy…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how a child's fundamental frequency (F0) and estimated voice level (dB SPL) change in distinct speaking environments. Method: A child age 5;7 (years;months) wore a National Center for Voice and Speech voice dosimeter for 4 days. The 2 parameters measured were F0 and dB SPL. During analysis, the F0…

Purpose: This investigation describes emergent literacy skills, print motivation, and home literacy environments in a linguistically diverse group of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: Emergent literacy skills were directly assessed in 41 children between the ages of 4 and 8 years. Parent report was solicited to provide…

Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to examine how children with isolated speech sound disorders (SSDs; n = 20), children with combined SSDs and language impairment (LI; n = 20), and typically developing children (n = 20), ages 3;3 (years;months) to 6;6, differ in narrative ability. The second purpose was to determine if early narrative…

Purpose: The validity of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) for children who speak African American English (AAE) was evaluated by conducting an item analysis and a comparison of the children's scores as a function of their maternal education level, nonmainstream dialect density, age, and clinical status. Method: The data…

Purpose: English speech acquisition in Russian-English (RE) bilingual children was investigated, exploring the effects of Russian phonetic and phonological properties on English single-word productions. Russian has more complex consonants and clusters and a smaller vowel inventory than English. Method: One hundred thirty-seven single-word samples…

Purpose: This article describes the development of a measure, called First Mentions (FM), that can be used to evaluate the referring expressions that children use to introduce characters and objects when telling a story. Method: Participants were 377 children ages 4 to 9 years (300 with typical development, 77 with language impairment) who told…

Purpose: This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of teachers' use of a print-referencing style during whole-class read-alouds with respect to accelerating 4- and 5-year-old children's print-knowledge development. It also examined 8 specific child- and setting-level moderators to determine whether these influenced the relation…

Purpose: The present article illustrates how the National Household Education Surveys (NHES; U.S. Department of Education, 2009) database might be used to address questions of relevance to researchers who are concerned with literacy development among young children. Following a general description of the NHES database, a study is provided that…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of building strong early childhood communities of interdisciplinary practice in the application of a comprehensive curriculum framework. A curriculum framework is proposed as a means of applying and extending the principles of response to intervention (RtI) to early childhood…