The Contribution of Vocabulary, Grammar, and Phonological Awareness Across a Continuum of Narrative Ability Levels in Young Children.

Purpose Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e.

Cross-domain associations between mathematical and narrative abilities in preschool-aged children.

Both mathematical and narrative abilities are considered critical dimensions of children's kindergarten readiness skills and are emphasized in developmental standards and readiness assessments during the prekindergarten period. Yet, despite considerable opportunities available to educators to leverage potential cross-domain associations in their instruction, little is known about how component math skills are associated with narrative skills. The current study extends prior theoretical and empirical work on cross-domain associations by examining the extent to which component math skills, constituting a kindergarten readiness assessment battery, are associated with narrative comprehension skills in children aged 4-6 years.

Development of the Narrative Assessment Protocol-2: A Tool for Examining Young Children's Narrative Skill.

Purpose Narrative skill, a child's ability to create a temporally sequenced account of an experience or event, is considered an important domain of children's language development. Narrative skill is strongly predictive of later language and literacy and is emphasized in curricula and educational standards. However, the need to transcribe a child's narrative and the lack of psychometrically justified scoring methods have precluded broad consideration of narrative skill among practitioners.

Association Between Television Viewing and Parent-Child Reading in the Early Home Environment.

Objective: This study examines whether there is an association between time spent by preschoolers in parent-child shared book reading versus TV viewing in two distinct samples.

Methods: Data were used from both the preschool wave of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Cohort, a nationally representative sample of 4-year-olds (N = 8900), as well as a low-income, rural sample of children enrolled in the Preschool Experience in Rural Classrooms study (N = 407). Information regarding frequency of shared book reading and daily TV consumption was obtained through caregiver report.

Age-Related Progressions in Story Structure in Young Children's Narratives.

Purpose: Prior theoretical and empirical work has referenced several broad stages of narrative development, particularly in terms of young children's understanding of story structure. However, there is considerable variation in how story structure has been defined and assessed across these studies. The aims of the present study were threefold: (a) to test the unidimensionality of items designed to assess story-structure knowledge, (b) to examine story-structure item difficulty levels, and (c) to examine age-related progressions on individual story-structure components across 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds.

Learning of idiomatic language expressions in a group intervention for children with autism.

In typical development, children learn an extensive range of idioms and other figurative (non-literal) language expressions during childhood and adolescence. However, many children with autism fall far behind in their idiom comprehension and production and never fully reach adult levels. The current study measured the effectiveness of a group idiom intervention for ten children, aged 7 to 12 years, with autism spectrum disorders.