The early language environments of low-income Hispanic children can be negatively affected when their Spanish-speaking caregivers face racism, assimilation pressure, and/or misinformed advice based on English-only ideologies. This article reports on the design and efficacy of Háblame Bebé, a language-promoting phone application that encourages low-income Hispanic mothers to talk more to their children in their native Spanish with the goals of (1) improving their children's early language environment, (2) promoting bilingualism, and (3) monitoring developmental milestones. The app was designed and tested across three phases as mandated by the US HRSA . In Phase I, we developed a curriculum that promotes high-quality language interactions in Spanish and designed the app components. In Phase II, we tested the app with 20 Hispanic mothers (half high school-educated, half college-educated) in a pretest-posttest design in which we examined their language interactions before and after two months of using the app. Preliminary results indicated that mother-child verbal interactions increased, but not always in their native Spanish, and the difference was not statistically significant. Focus group data revealed that many of the mothers had experienced linguistic racism and that tropes surrounding Spanish-speaking identity in the USA needed to be explicitly addressed within the intervention. In Phase III, a sociolinguistic pride component was added and the app was again tested with 12 additional Hispanic mothers (all high school-educated only). This time, a statistically significant increase in mother-child verbal interactions was found. Mothers also reported feeling prouder to use Spanish with their children. These results suggest that Háblame Bebé may be a viable means to reach low-income Hispanic caregivers who face obstacles in accessing health information and/or home-visiting programs for their children.

Understanding the relationship between children's cultural and linguistic diversity and child, caregiver, and environmental characteristics is important to ensure appropriate educational expectations and provisions. As part of the Longitudinal Outcomes of Children with Hearing Impairment (LOCHI) study, children's caregivers and educators completed questionnaires on demographic characteristics, including the communication mode (oral, manual, or mixed) and languages used in home and early educational environments. This article reports an exploratory analysis to examine factors associated with language use and communication mode of children at 3 years of age. A Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) analysis was performed on data from 406 children to examine factors influencing communication mode and oral language use. The factor that most influenced children's communication mode at home was the communication mode used by their female caregiver. Children's communication mode in their early education environment was most related to the communication mode they used at home, and then related to the presence of additional needs in the children, female caregivers' level of education and the male caregivers' use of languages other than English (LOTEs). A second exploratory CHAID analysis of data for children from multilingual families ( = 106) indicated that female caregivers' use of English at home significantly influenced whether children used a LOTE at home. Finally, the use of a LOTE at home was associated with the use of a LOTE in the early education environment. These findings serve as an initial description of the factors that were associated with the communication mode and language use of children with hearing loss.

Parents often turn to educators and healthcare professionals for advice on how to best support their child's language development. These professionals frequently suggest implementing the 'one-parent-one-language' approach to ensure consistent exposure to both languages. The goal of this study was to understand how language exposure influences the receptive vocabulary development of simultaneous bilingual children. To this end, we targeted nine German-French children growing up in bilingual families. Their exposure to each language within and outside the home was measured, as were their receptive vocabulary abilities in German and French. The results indicate that children are receiving imbalanced exposure to each language. This imbalance is leading to a slowed development of the receptive vocabulary in the minority language, while the majority language is keeping pace with monolingual peers. The one-parent-one-language approach does not appear to support the development of both of the child's languages in the context described in the present study. Bilingual families may need to consider other options for supporting the bilingual language development of their children. As professionals, we need to provide parents with advice that is based on available data and that is flexible with regards to the current and future needs of the child and his family.

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.

Children aged between two and 10 years were assessed on a new reception of syntax test (ROST). Validations of the test are reported for monolingual fluent control children under five (by examining the relationship with mean length of utterance and the Oxford Communication Development Inventory) and for over fives (relationship with a new judgement of grammaticality test using syntactic categories common to the two tests). Performance of these children was compared with performance of children who stutter and children with English as an additional language. In this study, the test was divided into under-five and over-five forms. Any young child progressing to the over-five syntactic categories, or any older child doing the under-five syntactic categories was dropped from the analysis. ROST scores prepared according to this scheme led to no differences between the control and either of the subject groups tested. However, compared to controls, the children with English as an additional language (but not children who stutter) had a significantly higher proportion of children above five who did the under-five categories (and were, therefore, excluded from the analyses). The higher proportion of children who did the under-five syntactic categories in the English as an additional language group indicates that group scores would have been lower if their syntax results had been included in the analysis. Further analyses provided some evidence that two groups with English as an additional language (Turkish and Cantonese speakers) did not perform any better on selected syntactic categories in their native language compared with their performance in English.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily illustrated through drawings, which tend to have third person subjects. In this paper we describe a method that has been successful in creating obligatory contexts for a first person morpheme - auxiliary - that heretofore has been assessed exclusively through spontaneous speech samples. Participants were 32 mainstream American English-speaking children comprising three diagnostic subgroups: children with SLI, typically developing age-matched peers, and younger typically developing peers matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). The children participated in a task in which they described their actions for an audience; these descriptions required the use of auxiliary . The results revealed that the children with SLI used auxiliary with significantly smaller percentages than both groups of typically developing children, a finding that is consistent with findings that employ other tense and agreement morphemes. Clinical applications of this method are discussed.