How Do Teachers of Deaf Pre-Readers Communicating in American Sign Language Select Storybooks for Read-Alouds?

Teachers of the d/Deaf (TODs) struggle to select appropriate storybooks for elementary-aged Deaf pre-readers who use American Sign Language (Hayes & Shaw, 1994). Hayes and Shaw (1994) created a book selection system for TODs, but their methodology was difficult to evaluate. The purpose of the present research was to create an empirically derived book selection system using a sorting task methodology that has been successfully adapted for creating book selection systems (Schwarz et al.

Do acting out verbs with dolls and comparison learning between scenes boost toddlers' verb comprehension?

To better understand how toddlers integrate multiple learning strategies to acquire verbs, we compared sensorimotor recruitment and comparison learning because both strategies are thought to boost children's access to scene-level information. For sensorimotor recruitment, we tested having toddlers use dolls as agents and compared this strategy with having toddlers observe another person enact verbs with dolls. For comparison learning, we compared providing pairs of: (a) training scenes in which animate objects with similar body-shapes maintained agent/patient roles with (b) scenes in which objects with dissimilar body-shapes switched agent/patient roles.

A Read-Aloud Storybook Selection System for Prereaders at the Preschool Language Level: A Pilot Study.

Purpose: Many well-accepted systems for determining difficulty level exist for books children read independently, but few are available for determining the wide range of difficulty levels of storybooks read aloud to preschoolers. Also, the available tools list book characteristics only on the basis of parents' or authors' opinions. We created an empirically derived difficulty-level system on the basis of 22 speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) judgments of specific storybooks used in preschooler read-alouds.

The effects of race and maternal education level on children's retells of the Renfrew Bus Story--North American Edition.

Purpose: The Renfrew Bus Story--North American Edition (RBS-NA; C. Glasgow & J. Cowley, 1994) is widely used in clinical and research settings to determine children's language abilities, although possible influences of race and maternal education on RBS-NA performance are unknown.

Should we use telegraphic or grammatical input in the early stages of language development with children who have language impairments? A meta-analysis of the research and expert opinion.

Purpose: In working with children with language impairments, some clinical scholars and clinicians advocate using input that is simplified to the point of being ungrammatical (telegraphic input), while others advocate simplified but grammatical input. This article considers 2 types of external evidence on this topic.

Method: First, a meta-analysis of relevant research, including intervention studies and processing studies, is reported.