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Lipsey, Farran, and Durkin (2018) report the results from the third-grade follow-up of children who, as four-year-olds, were in the treatment and control groups of the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program (TVPK). Results include an intent-to-treat analysis of state test scores based on a randomized trial (RCT). TVPK produced substantive positive impacts on children during the pre-K year, but differences between treatment and control children faded to zero, and, for state test scores, turned negative as children moved through elementary school. The negative outcomes, although not without precedent, are surprising to many. The more general finding of very rapid fadeout of preschool impacts is consistent with a large number of studies. Researchers and policymakers can respond to the Lipsey et al. findings in several ways. These include dismissing the findings because of the assertion that TVPK is a low-quality program, or arguing that the research design was flawed, or claiming that the results of other strong studies of preschool interventions conflict with results reported for TVPK. Each of these lines of attack does not survive close inspection of their empirical entailments. Three paths forward are respectful of the findings: (1) continuing the priority of advancing public pre-K for four-year-olds, coupled with efforts to improve longer-term program effects by capitalizing on findings from research on heterogeneity of impacts; (2) reframing the purpose and metrics for success of pre-K away from affecting children’s achievement in later grades to providing positive and engaging experiences for children when they are enrolled; and (3) pursuing new models of policy that shift the focus from school readiness to family support. Significant additional investments in research and evaluation will be required to pursue the effectiveness of new policy frameworks for early care and learning.

The impact of a shared-reading program on the narrative skills of children from low-income families was examined. Participants in the study were 4-year-old children (N=123) enrolled in Head Start. Fifty-eight percent of the sample participated in a 30-week shared-reading intervention conducted in Head Start classrooms and homes. The remainder of the sample experienced the regular Head Start curriculum. The shared-reading intervention was found to have a significant effect on children's inclusion of evaluative devices in their narratives. Specifically, children who participated in the intervention program were significantly more likely to include references to internal states of characters and dialogue in their narratives at the end of the Head Start year than children who did not participate in the intervention program. This study adds to the growing experimental literature demonstrating that preschool literacy interventions can have a positive impact on the language skills of children from low-income families.

This study examined code-related and oral language precursors to reading in a longitudinal study of 626 children from preschool through 4th grade. Code-related precursors, including print concepts and phonological awareness, and oral language were assessed in preschool and kindergarten. Reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills were examined in 1st through 4th grades. Results demonstrated that (a) the relationship between code-related precursors and oral language is strong during preschool; (b) there is a high degree of continuity over time of both code-related and oral language abilities; (c) during early elementary school, reading ability is predominantly determined by the level of print knowledge and phonological awareness a child brings from kindergarten; and (d) in later elementary school, reading accuracy and reading comprehension appear to be 2 separate abilities that are influenced by different sets of skills.

This study examined the effects of age and schooling on emergent literacy and early reading skills of 337 children from low-income backgrounds. Children were followed longitudinally from the end of Head Start to the end of 1st grade. A subset of the sample (n = 183) was followed through the end of 2nd grade. The oldest children in preschool and kindergarten had significantly stronger emergent literacy skills than classmates who were younger by 10 months. These differences did not translate to differences in reading skill at the end of 1st or 2nd grade. Children who began school a year earlier than same-age peers outperformed these peers on measures of both emergent literacy skills and early reading skills. The impact of a year of schooling on emergent literacy skills was 1.7 times greater than the impact of other processes associated with age. The impact of a year of schooling on early reading was 4.3 times stronger than the effect of age.

The present investigation is a replication of an emergent literacy intervention in Head Start with a new cohort of children and includes a follow-up of both the original cohort and the replication cohort through the end of 2nd grade. Positive effects at the end of Head Start obtained in the original study were replicated, and effects on emergent literacy skills in both cohorts were maintained through the end of kindergarten. Effects of the emergent literacy intervention did not generalize to literacy outcomes at the end of 1st and 2nd grades. Growth in emergent literacy skills and literacy skills from year to year was strongly influenced by variation in the Head Start centers and school districts attended by children in the sample. Although children in the sample began formal reading instruction with relatively low levels of emergent literacy skills, they showed substantial gains with respect to national norms by the end of 2nd grade.

The effects of an interactive shared-reading intervention were evaluated with 3-to 4-year-old children from low-income families who attended subsidized child care. The children entered the program with oral language skills that were significantly below age-level as measured by standardized tests. Children were pretested and randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: (a) no treatment control, (b) a school condition in which children were read to by their teachers in small groups, (c) a home condition in which children were read to by their parents, and (d) a combined school plus home condition. Parents and teachers were trained in a specific form of interactive reading via an instructional videotape. The intervention was conducted for 6 weeks, after which children were posttested on standardized measures of oral language, and language samples were obtained during a shared-reading assessment. Significant effects of the reading intervention were obtained at posttest and were largest for children in conditions involving home reading.

This study examined how preschool inattention-hyperactivity is related to elementary school reading achievement. Prereading skills were hypothesized to be a link between them. This link was explored using longitudinal data on 105 low-socioeconomic-status (SES) children's inattentive-hyperactive behavior and prereading skills in Head Start and in kindergarten and their inattentive-hyperactive behavior and reading skills in first grade. A model of this relationship was tested using structural equation modeling. The results failed to show a significant path between inattention-hyperactivity and prereading skills at both the Head Star and kindergarten levels. A significant path was found between first grade inattention-hyperactivity and reading skills, confirming that the strong relationship between inattention-hyperactivity and poor reading achievement commonly found in children from other SES levels was also significant in this low-SES sample. Strong relationships were found between prereading skills and reading skills, as well as among hyperactivity levels at the three grades. The issue of the direction of the path of influence between attention-behavior and reading achievement is addressed briefly; however, the results indicate that further longitudinal work is necessary to resolve this issue.

Classrooms of 4-year-olds attending Head Start were randomly assigned to an intervention condition, involving an add-on emergent literacy curriculum, or a control condition, involving the regular Head Start curriculum. Children in the intervention condition experienced interactive book reading at home and in the classroom as well as a classroom-based sound and letter awareness program. Children were pretested and posttested on standardized tests of language, writing, linguistic awareness, and print concepts

The effects of an interactive book reading program were assessed with children from low-income families who attended subsidized day-care centers in New York. The children entered the program with language development in standard English vocabulary and expression that was about 10 months behind chronological age on standardized tests. Children were pretested and assigned randomly within classrooms to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) a school plus home condition in which the children were read to by their teachers and their parents, (b) a school condition in which children were read to only by teachers, and (c) a control condition in which children engaged in play activities under the supervision of their teachers. Training of adult readers was based on a self-instructional video

G. J. Whitehurst et al. (1988) taught mothers specific interactive techniques to use when reading picture books with their preschool-age children. This intervention program, called dialogic reading, produced substantial effects on preschool children's language development. However, the costs of one-on-one training limit the widespread use of dialogic reading techniques. In this study the authors aimed to replicate and extend the results of the original study of dialogic reading by developing and evaluating an inexpensive videotape training package for teaching dialogic reading techniques. Mothers were randomly assigned to receive no training, traditional direct training, or videotape training

The relations between home literacy environment and child language ability were examined for 323 4-year-olds attending Head Start and their mothers or primary caregivers. Overall frequency of shared picture book reading, age of onset of picture book reading, duration of shared picture book reading during one recent day, number of picture books in the home, frequency of child's requests to engage in shared picture book reading, frequency of child's private play with books, frequency of shared trips to the library, frequency of caregiver's private reading, and caregiver's enjoyment of private reading constituted the literacy environment, and were measured using a questionnaire completed by each child's primary caregiver. Using a primary subsample of 236 children, a composite literacy environment score was derived from the literacy environment measures and was correlated with a composite child language measure, derived from two standardized tests of language skills. Depending on the form of regression analysis employed and depending on whether primary caregiver IQ and education were entered into the prediction equations, from 12% to 18.5% of the variance in child language scores was accounted for by home literacy environment. These analyses were cross-validated on a secondary subsample of 87 children with similar results. The strength of the relations between home literacy environment and child language are stronger in this study than in previous research, due to the use of statistically derived aggregate measures of literacy environment. The presence of substantial variability in home literacy environments in low-income families, and the substantial relations between these environments and child language outcomes has important implications for intervention.

Previous research demonstrates linguistic advances in middle-class 2-year-olds in the United States resulting from training parents to read with their children following a particular style. This style, called dialogic reading, encourages children to talk about picture books and gives them models and feedback for progressively more sophisticated language use. This research extends these procedures to a day-care setting using 20 Mexican 2-year-olds from low-income backgrounds. Children in the intervention group were read to individually by a teacher using dialogic reading techniques. The control group children were given individual arts and crafts instruction by the same teacher

The role of otitis media (OM) was investigated in a group of preschool children with a rigorously defined language impairment: developmental expressive language disorder (ELD)

Early developmental language delay is characterized by slow development of language in preschoolers. The condition is frequent amoung tow-and three-year-olds, causes concern among parents, and generates differences of opinion as to significance among informed professionals. Poorer long-term outcomes are much more likely if language delay persists until the later preschool year, and if the dealy is not specific to language and/or includes problems in understanding. Specific language delay in the preschool period is better characterized as a risk factor than disorder, most children with specific language delay recover to the normal range by five years of age.

The authors of this chapter propose and test a model of individual differences in the development of emergent literacy. The model provides a means for evaluating the contribution of various aspects of the home environment to children's emerging literacy skills and helps to clarify the processes by which family environment and different domains of emergent literacy are related.

We explored why an effective speaker-training technique failed to generalize to listener skills by comparing the relative effectiveness of speaker and listener training. Our hypotheses were that: either listening tasks utilize different skills than speaking tasks (thus one should not expect transfer), or the acquisition of listener skills precedes the acquisition of speaker skills (thus the transfer patterns tested in our previous research—speaker to listener—violated the normal developmental sequence), or there is no spontaneous transfer between tasks in different modalities (even though such tasks require the use of some of the same skills). This research utilized a referential communication paradigm. Five-year-olds received either speaker training, listener training, or both speaker and listener training. Children were tested for transfer on speaking and listening task after a 1-week delay. The results suggest that although speaking and listening tasks appear to require, at least in part, certain of the same skills, preschoolers do not exhibit spontaneous intermodality transfer. Theoretical implications for the relationship between speaker and listener skills are discussed.

An analysis of the mirror-image discrimination literature revealed a number of inconsistent and paradoxical results. A unifying conception was proposed and it was argued that lateral mirror-image stimuli constitute a special class of problems on which effective performance is related to the introduction of an asymmetrical event into the task. Some implications were derived and tested in two experiments. First, five different response modes were compared for children required to discriminate two lateral or up-down mirror-image stimulus pairs. Acquisition was significantly faster on the latter problems. On the former, it was shown that responding to just one side of the lateral mirror-image stimuli led to significantly faster learning. Subsequent generalization tests indicated control by one part of the stimulus display for those who responded to one side. Next, S s unable to learn the problem in Experiment I were given further acquisition trials. Only those children given training designed to promote selective stimulus control learned the problem.

Psycholinguists have often lost sight of the functions of language in their search for structural regularities. This paper focuses on three social learning variables whose roles in language development have often been discounted. Feedback or reinforcement has been said to be unrelated to grammatical development since parents tend to reinforce the truth instead of the grammar of their children's utterances. But evidence is presented showing that feedback for the child's comprehension responses can affect production of grammatical forms. Modeling or imitation has been said to be unimportant in grammatical development because most children's utterances are novel and because the frequency of imitation appears unrelated to the rate of language growth. But evidence is presented showing how many utterances can be both imitative and novel and showing that the role of these selective imitations has not been assessed properly in many studies. Contextual constraints on language have been considered unimportant in many psycholinguistic theories. But evidence is presented showing that communicative competence is related critically to the ability to adjust utterances to contextual constraints and that the language of the young child is deficient in this regard. The educational advantages of a functional analysis of language are discussed.

The association of behavior problems with preschool language disorders has been documented extensively. However, researchers have typically failed to differentiate subgroups of language-impaired children, to use observational data in documenting the behavior disorders, or to study children at the youngest ages. Using a multimodal assessment, this study examined parent-child interaction and behavior problems in a clearly defined subgroup of language-impaired children, those with developmental expressive language disorder (ELD). These children exhibit a delay in expressive language compared with receptive language and nonverbal cognitive skills. Subjects were identified and studied at the youngest age at which the disorder can be assessed. A group of ELD children, averaging 27 months of age, was contrasted with a group of normally developing children, matched for age, sex, and receptive language ability. Groups were compared on observed parent-child interactions as well as maternal responses on the Parenting Stress Index, the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory, and a behavior-related structured interview. ELD children, when compared with normally developing children, exhibited higher levels of negative behavior and were perceived as different by their parents.

Reviewer reliability is examined for the first 2 years of operation of Developmental Review . Using the statistic, Finn's r , summary recommendations on publishability are shown to be higher in reliability than previously reported for other journals. Separate rating scales are shown to be less reliable than summary recommendations. Finn's r is compared with the intraclass correlation coefficient and shown to be a better method for examining reviewer agreement across different journals. Potential causes of high reviewer agreement for Developmental Review are discussed, and the importance of the distinction between reliability and validity of reviews is noted.

Groups of 5-year-olds in two experiments described multidimensional triangles for a listener. The attribute differentiating referent triangles from nonreferent triangles in Experiment I was constant across trials for the simple condition group, while any one of three attributes was distinctive on a given trial for the complex condition group. One-adjective messages by subjects in the simple condition were virtually always informative; in the complex group, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. The boundaries of the variation effect were assessed in Experiment II. In addition to the simple-complex variation of the relevant attributes, the values of the irrelevant attributes either varied across trials in the diverse groups or remained constant in the constant groups. One-adjective messages were informative only in the simple-constant group; in the other groups, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. Thus, young children can base their communications on a comparative analysis of stimulus arrays, but performance deteriorates when there is any variation in relevant or irrelevant attributes. These results were discussed in relation to various theories of the development of meaning and communication: the cognitive overload theory, the broad context theory, and the perceptual saliency theory.

Five experiments were conducted on what 6-year-old children learn about communication by switching listener and speaker roles with competent and incompetent adults and peers. Experiment I demonstrated that children become better communicators to adults after listening to competent adults, competent peers, and incompetent peers, but not incompetent adults. The age of the listener was shown to have an effect in Experiment II, with children becoming less effective communicators when speaking to a peer after listening to an incompetent peer but better communicators when speaking to an adult after listening to an incompetent peer. Experiments III, IV, and V were designed to determine why children do not improve or deteriorate after listening to incompetent adults. It is not deficient memory: Children remember well the ambiguous messages of adults (Experiment IV). It is not implicit demands to be polite to an adult (Experiment III). It is that children think the ambiguous messages of an adult are competent (Experiment V). Mixing the authority and prestige of an adult with incompetent messages leads the child to ignore the adult's behavior as a standard for his or her own performance. These results suggest that social learning of communication skills might occur best when the child can learn what not to do by interacting with peers and what to do when interacting with adults.

Six 4- to 5-yr-old subjects were exposed to five sessions in which an adult model used passive sentences to describe a set of modeling stimuli. Probe stimuli, which the subjects were asked to describe without benefit of modeling and without selective reinforcement were interspersed among modeling stimuli. A matched group of control subjects received probletrials but no modeling trials. Both groups of subjects were subsequently tested on their ability to comprehend active and passive sentence forms. Every subject in the experimental group produced passive sentences on probe trials even though there was considerable variability in the number of passives produced. No control subject produced passives. The modeling procedure increased the comprehension scores of the experimental group above those of the control group though the scores of both groups were above chance. The results were contrasted with earlier studies in which modeling was ineffective in producing passive usage and in which comprehension of the passive was not demonstrated by even older children.

The role of comprehension training in the selective imitation of indirect-direct object sentences was assessed for six preschool children. A modeling condition resulted in normal usage of indirect-direct object sentences for five of six subjects, but reversed usage was not obtained when modeling was reversed. Subsequent receptive comprehension training on normal and reversed forms of indirect-direct object sentences resulted in generalization to the productive mode. These results were related to an hypothesis about language acquisition in which selective imitation is a function of comprehension.

The level of imitative behavior displayed by four preschool children was assessed during experimenter presence, experimenter absence, and under a differential reinforcement condition where only two of four responses were reinforced. Imitations were frequently performed during experimenter presence but were seldom observed when the experimenter was absent. Three of the four subjects imitated differentially under the reinforcement condition. However, the presence of the experimenter served to abolish this performance in two subjects. An attempt to add to the complexity of the stimulus situation by increasing the number and type of behaviors demonstrated to these two subjects, was not successful in maintaining nonreinforced imitations. The study indicates the need for a more precise definition of “generalized imitation” and emphasizes the importance of antecedent and setting conditions as factors in the multiple control of imitation.

Imitation and modeling were compared in a multiple-baseline individual analysis. Probe pictures and training pictures were presented to normal pre-school subjects. In modeling, an adult used sentences—including either participial, prepositional, appositive, or infinitive phrases—to describe training pictures. Without responding to the training pictures, the children were asked to describe the probe pictures. In imitation training, in addition to responding to probe pictures, subjects were reinforced for directly imitating a description of training pictures. The dependent variable was the frequency with which the children used the phrase type being exemplified on training trials to describe pictures presented on probe trials. Both procedures were successful in producing imitation of the structure of the model's utterances on probe trials even though the content of the utterances on probe trials was not imitative. Imitation training was effective for every phrase type and subject while modeling was effective for only some subjects and some phrase types. Relationships between these two procedures and the normal environment of language acquisition were discussed.

Two-year-old children were trained through differential reinforcement and imitation to label nine pairs of color-figure combinations with labels specific to each color and each figure. Subsequently, they were taught to label one of the nine pairs of stimuli with a new form of utterance involving the same labels. The form of response prompted and reinforced to this one stimulus pair alternated between the two response forms over the course of the study. The remaining eight stimulus pairs were presented as probes for the S to label without benefit of modeling or reinforcement. After learning both response forms to each set of stimuli, the Ss would label the eight probe stimulus sets with the grammatical response form being modeled and reinforced with respect to the one training stimulus set. The results of the study were discussed in terms of the formation of response classes based on structural differences among responses. The generalized labeling that occurred was related to current research on generalized imitation.

In a two-choice paired-presentation discrimination task, 120 children at two age levels were either reinforced for correct responses, punished for incorrect responses, or rewarded for correct responses and punished for incorrect responses at either of two levels of task complexity. Reinforcement and punishment were nonverbal and were accomplished by either presenting or removing tokens. Task complexity was varied in terms of the number of irrelevant stimulus dimensions to which a response could be made. Highly significant treatment effects favored the combination of reinforcement and punishment, with no difference appearing between the reinforcement group and the punishment group. This relationship was constant across both age and task complexity, with no significant interactions occurring.

Novel and appropriate two word responses were produced by two year old children as a result of a training procedure involving imitation, differential reinforcement, and a sequence that kept one word of two word responses constant over all response combinations. Further analysis resulted in a breakdown of ordered responding when the constant response member was no longer available as part of the response unit. This suggested that grammatically appropriate responding was the result of control described as a partially conditioned frame. The function of stimulus control in determining the appropriateness of novel responding was discussed.

Intraverbal learning is a process through which semantic knowledge is acquired from purely linguistic information. The concern of this study is to investigate the role of intraverbal learning in the preschool-aged child's acquisition of semantic concepts. Three- and 4-year-old children were either shown pictures illustrating novel concepts or they were told verbal definitions of novel concepts, the definitions containing information about key physical and functional properties. An additional manipulation consisted of including or omitting information about the superordinate category membership of the concept. Concept acquisition was assessed via a battery of comprehension tasks; these tasks assessed both referential and formal knowledge of the concepts. Results indicate a correspondence between the type of information received and the type of knowledge acquired, with intraverbal information resulting in broader knowledge than pictorial information. Purely pictorial information was associated with referential knowledge only, while intraverbal information enhanced both referential and formal knowledge.

WHITEHURST, GROVER J. The Development of Communication: Changes with Age and Modeling. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 473-482. 2 studies were conducted with a task allowing detailed examination of how information in stimulus arrays is captured in children's descriptions. Rather than conforming to a principle of minimal redundancy, communications become increasingly redundant over the early school years. Short messages, a minority at all ages, are based on a contrastive analysis of the referential field in older children. However, short descriptions by preschool and grade 1 children are often based on "randomly" selected attributes of a referent and, therefore, are incomplete and noninformative. The normative performance at the grade 1 level was compared with that of children given preliminary experience of listening and responding to the incomplete versus contrastive communication of an adult. Children imitate the communciation style of an adult without regard to its effects on their ability to respond correctly as a speaker. The implications for a role-playing analysis of communication development were discussed. Though children imitate aspects of a model's communication style, their methods of analysis of stimulus arrays are idiosyncratic, largely determined by a principle of least effort.

SONNENSCHEIN, SUSAN, and WHITEHURST, GROVER J. Developing Referential Communication: A Hierarchy of Skills. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1936-1945. This study is 1 in a series in which we have attempted to determine the nature and psychological organization of the components of referential communication. Our premise has been that preschoolers lack knowledge of certain procedural rules of communication; they often are unaware that a message should differentiate referents from nonreferents and that certain rules are applicable for both speaking and listening. Training on these rules has led to improved speaking and listening performance. In this study, we investigate whether previous failures to obtain transfer from speaking and listening tasks to criticism tasks were because of criticism requiring a more abstract level of skill, and if so, the nature of that skill. 5-year-olds received difference-rule training on either speaking, listening, or criticism tasks (this type of training had previously been effective in improving speaking or listening skills). Data indicated that the skills required for a child to assign blame for others' communicative failures are superordinate to the child's speaking, listening, and self-evaluation skills, and the skills involved in evaluating others' communicative performance can transfer to the child's own speaking and listening. Discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical applications of the findings vis-A-vis referential communication as well as the adaptability of such a methodology for probing the organization of any group of related tasks and skills.

Monolingual American and Mexican 2- and 3-year-old children were exposed to a foreign language in a naturalistic but controlled environment. Children were randomly assigned to 2 groups. 1 group was differentially reinforced throughout the study for the use of foreign vocabulary. The control group was first reinforced nondifferentially for use of the native language or the foreign language and later was switched to differential reinforcement for the foreign language. Frequencies of spontaneous foreign word production and other verbal responses were computed, and formal assessments of comprehension and production of the foreign words were conducted. Differential reinforcement resulted in accelerating frequencies of spontaneous foreign language use and better performance on both comprehension and production tests. Under nondifferential reinforcement, rates of spontaneous foreign language use were low and static. Results are interpreted as evidence that the acquisition of expressive vocabulary is a function of socially mediated reinforcement.

The effects on vocabulary acquisition of child-initiated versus adult-initiated instances of adult labeling were studied. 16 monolingual, English-speaking preschool children were exposed to a Spanish-speaking adult. In order to have access to toys placed out of their reach, children had to request the toys in Spanish. For the experimental group, adult labeling occurred when the children expressed interest in the toy. Control group children were yoked temporally to experimental group children for the purpose of adult labeling. Thus, adult labeling for the control group was randomly related to the children's expressions of interest. Although both groups of children learned some Spanish words, children in the experimental group produced significantly more Spanish words during the training sessions and showed superior performance on posttraining tests of Spanish production. Levels of comprehension of the Spanish words were equivalent for both groups. Results are interpreted in the context of the literature on "incidental teaching" and are viewed as demonstrating the critical role in language acquisition of the timing of exposure to language models.