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). A latent shape growth curve model was used to model reading skills at 4 time points from preschool through fifth grade. RESULTS: In comparison to children with TL, children with LD showed lower reading skills in preschool, but their overall reading growth was faster. All children developed the skills associated with reading more rapidly at earlier ages compared to later ages. Children with LD continued to exhibit reading skills that were substantially lower than those of children with TL during fifth grade. CONCLUSION: Results supported the compensatory trajectory of development. Speech-language pathologists are encouraged to adopt evidence-based practices in order to boost reading outcomes for children with LD beginning in preschool.

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., dramatic play, art, storybook reading) and instructional processes (e.g., teacher use of open-ended questions, recasts, and expansions). Specific aims included to (a) examine program differentiation by determining how measures of activity contexts and instructional processes differentiated treatment and comparison teachers, (b) determine treatment teachers' adherence to both activity contexts and instructional processes over an entire academic year, and (c) determine treatment teachers' reported quality of program delivery and comfort with curriculum implementation. METHOD: Fourteen preschool teachers were randomly assigned to implement the LFC or to maintain their prevailing curriculum. Fidelity was measured 3 times over an academic year using a curriculum fidelity checklist. RESULTS: LFC teachers exhibited fidelity to activity contexts more readily than to instructional processes. Teacher use of language-focused instructional processes was relatively low even after a year of LFC implementation. CONCLUSION: This study supports the need for speech-language pathologists to work closely with preschool educators to implement the activity contexts and instructional processes associated with high-quality preschool language-learning environments.

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., open questions, recasts, models). METHOD: Fourteen preschool teachers were randomly assigned to 2 conditions. Treatment teachers implemented the experimental curriculum for an academic year; a total of 100 children were enrolled in their classrooms. Comparison teachers maintained their prevailing curriculum; a total of 96 children were enrolled in these classrooms. Teachers' fidelity of implementation was monitored using structured observations conducted 3 times during the academic year. Children's growth in expressive language was assessed using measures derived from language samples in the fall and spring, specifically percent complex utterances, rate of noun use, number of different words, and upper bound index. RESULTS: Children's language skill in the fall, socioeconomic status (household income), and daily attendance served as significant, positive predictors of their language skill in the spring. The impact of the language curriculum and LST exposure was moderated by children's classroom attendance, in that the language curriculum accelerated language growth for children who attended preschool regularly; a similar effect was seen for LST exposure. CONCLUSIONS: Adoption of a comprehensive language curriculum may provide a value-added benefit only under highly specific circumstances. Findings suggest that at-risk children who receive relatively large doses of a curriculum (as measured in days of attendance during the academic year) that emphasizes quality language instruction may experience accelerated expressive language growth during pre-kindergarten.

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). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.