Reading trajectories of children with language difficulties from preschool through fifth grade.

Purpose: The current work examined which theory of reading development, the cumulative reading trajectory or the compensatory trajectory of development, most accurately represents the reading trajectories of children with language difficulties (LD) relative to their peers with typical language (TL) skills. Specifically, initial levels of reading skills, overall rate of growth, and patterns of growth were examined.

Method: Children were classified according to whether or not they exhibited LD at 54 months of age (LD n = 145; TL n = 653), using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Child Care Research Network (see NICHD, 1993).

Experimental evaluation of a preschool language curriculum: influence on children's expressive language skills.

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to investigate child impacts following implementation of a comprehensive language curriculum, the Language-Focused Curriculum (LFC; Bunce, 1995), within their preschool classrooms. As part of this larger purpose, this study identified child-level predictors of expressive language outcomes for children attending at-risk preschool programs as well as main effects for children's exposure to the language curriculum and its active ingredients-namely, teacher use of language stimulation techniques (LSTs; e.g.

Preschool teachers' fidelity in implementing a comprehensive language-rich curriculum.

Purpose: This study examined preschool teachers' fidelity to the language-focused curriculum (LFC; B. Bunce, 1995), a comprehensive classroom curriculum designed to improve at-risk children's language outcomes through targeted improvements to a classroom's activity contexts (e.g.

Action speaks louder than words: young children differentially weight perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn verbs.

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3).