The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence to support direct vocabulary intervention practices for primary school-age children with language impairment (LI). A rationale for providing direct vocabulary intervention for children with LI is outlined by reviewing typical and atypical vocabulary acquisition, evidence of instructional strategies from research in mainstream and special education is summarised, and suggestions for vocabulary intervention activities that facilitate deep word knowledge are provided. Suggestions for choosing appropriate vocabulary, using strategies during direct intervention, and conducting activities that increase depth of vocabulary knowledge are included.

The results are useful in interpreting the performance of African American children during the prekindergarten school year.

Purpose To report preliminary comparisons of developing structural characteristics associated with fictional and personal narratives in school-age African American children. Method Forty-three children, grades two through five, generated a fictional and a personal narrative in response to a wordless-book elicitation task and a story-prompt task, respectively. Narratives produced in these two contexts were characterized for macrostructure, microstructure, and dialect density. Differences across narrative type and grade level were examined. Results Statistically significant differences between the two types of narratives were found for both macrostructure and microstructure but not for dialect density. There were no grade-related differences in macrostructure, microstructure, or dialect density. Conclusion The results demonstrate the complementary role of fictional and personal narratives for describing young children's narrative skills. Use of both types of narrative tasks and descriptions of both macrostructure and macrostructure may be particularly useful for characterizing the narrative abilities of young school-age African American children, for whom culture-fair methods are scarce. Further study of additional dialect groups is warranted.

ToM indicators, such as false-belief mentioning, provide information about African American children's narrative ability and appear to be dialect-neutral.

This person-centered study examines the extent to which parents’ language dominance influences the effects of an after school, multi-family group intervention, FAST, on low-income children’s emotional and behavioral outcomes via parents’ relations with other parents and with school staff. Social capital resides in relationships of trust and shared expectations, which are highly dependent on whether parents share the language of other parents and teachers. This study is based on a community epidemiologically-defined sample of Latino families (N = 3,091) in San Antonio, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona. Latent profile analyses revealed three language profiles of parents across the two cities: English-dominant, Spanish-dominant, and bilingual. Path models revealed that FAST did not have a direct or indirect effect on children’s emotional and behavior functioning, although FAST increased parent-parent and parent-school social capital among Spanish-dominant parents in Arizona and these parent-parent relations were associated with better child outcomes. Implications for interventions are discussed.

The results suggest the need for narrative elicitation contexts that include verbal as well as visual tasks to fully describe the narrative performance of school-age African American children with typical development.

Phonological and semantic deficits in spoken word learning have been documented in children with language impairment (LI), and cues that address these deficits have been shown to improve their word learning performance. However, the effects of such cues on word learning during reading remain largely unexplored. This study investigated whether (a) control, (b) phonological, (c) semantic, and (d) combined phonological-semantic conditions affected semantic word learning during reading in 9- to 11-year-old children with LI (n = 12) and with typical language (TL, n = 11) from low-income backgrounds. Children were exposed to 20 novel words across these four conditions prior to reading passages containing the novel words. After reading, a dynamic semantic assessment was given, which included oral definitions, contextual clues, and multiple choices. Results indicated that the LI group performed more poorly than the TL group in phonological and combined conditions, but not in the control or semantic conditions. Also, a similar trend for both groups was suggested, with improved performance in the semantic and combined conditions relative to the control and phonological conditions. Clinical implications include a continued need for explicit instruction in semantic properties of novel words to facilitate semantic word learning during reading in children with LI.

Purpose This study investigated classroom differences in the narrative performance of school-age African American English (AAE)-speaking children in gifted and general education classrooms. Method 43 children, grades 2 through 5, each generated fictional narratives in response to the Frog, Where Are You? book (Mayer, 1969). Differences in performance on traditional narrative measures (total number of C-units, number of different words, and mean length of utterance in words) and on AAE production (dialect density measure) between children in gifted- and general education classrooms were examined. Results Classroom-based differences in TNCU, NDW, and MLU-w did not exist. Children in gifted education classrooms produced narratives with lower DDM than did children in general educated classrooms. Direct logistic regression assessed whether narrative DDM scores offered additional information about giftedness beyond scores on the PPVT-4—a standard measure of language ability. Results indicated that a model with only PPVT-4 scores best discriminated children in the two classrooms. Conclusion African American children across gifted and general education classrooms produce fictional narratives of similar length, lexical diversity, and syntax complexity. However, African American children in gifted education classrooms may produce lower rates of AAE and perform better on standard measures of vocabulary than children in general education classrooms.