This article reports a study on the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Mexican town. Aiming to help fill the gap between research on maternal schooling and health and that on reading and literacy, the researchers apply a particular theory of literacy and schooling to understand the health-related language and literacy skills of mothers living in a rural Me...

This longitudinal study compared the development of oral language and more specifically narrative skills (storytelling and story retelling) in children with specific language impairment (SLI) with and without literacy delay. Therefore, 18 children with SLI and 18 matched controls with normal literacy were followed from the last year of kindergarten (mean age=5 years 5 months) until the beginnin...

The increased access to sound that cochlear implants have provided to profoundly deaf children has allowed them to develop English speech and language skills more successfully than using hearing aids alone. The purpose of this study was to determine how well early postimplant language skills were able to predict later language ability. Thirty children who received a cochlear implant between the...

N ot long ago it was common to find instructors teaching languages, particularly Eng-lish in non-English-speaking countries, without a degree and with little to no experience or expertise. But today, governmental agencies like Mexico's Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education) have begun to require that teachers have a degree that demonstrates sufficient skill and language ...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether there is an association of level of fetal cocaine exposure to developmental precursors of speech-language skills at 1 year of age, after controlling for confounding factors. DESIGN In a prospective, longitudinal, quasi-experimental, matched cohort design, 3 cocaine exposure groups were defined by maternal self-report and infant meconium assay: nonexposure (n = 131)...

While many studies have reported working memory (WM) impairments in autism spectrum disorders, others do not. Sample characteristics, WM domain, and task complexity likely contribute to these discrepancies. Although deficits in visuospatial WM have been more consistently documented, there is much controversy regarding verbal WM in autism. The goal of the current study was to explore visuospatia...

We explored the use of technology-assisted, trialogue-based tasks to measure the English language proficiency of students learning English as a second or foreign language. A presumed benefit of the system for language assessment is its suitability for use in scenario-based tasks that integrate multiple language skills. This integration allows test developers to simulate real-life language use s...