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Research Findings: We examined the amount of preschool lead/assistant teachers' English/Spanish language use and relations between quality of teacher-child interactions, and Dual Language Learners' (DLLs) English/Spanish bilingual vocabulary in 31 English-medium Head Start classrooms. Measures in this study included (a) children's conceptual English/Spanish bilingual receptive and expressive vocabulary, (b) classroom quality via systematic observation, (c) video coding of the amount of utterances of teacher Spanish use in classrooms, and (d) a set of child- and teacher-level covariates. Results showed that Spanish was used much less than English by both teachers and DLLs. DLLs spoke more Spanish than teachers and directed most Spanish to peers. For high levels of Emotional Support, teachers' Spanish use was significantly negatively associated with English/Spanish bilingual expressive and receptive vocabulary. For low levels of Emotional Support and high levels of Instructional Support, higher amounts of teachers' Spanish use were significantly positively associated with higher levels of children's English/Spanish bilingual expressive and receptive vocabulary. Practice or Policy: Emotionally-supportive practices may enable monolingual teachers to facilitate their DLLs' learning through creating relationships that may counteract strain from language barriers. Spanish instruction provides asupportive effect for DLLs and may contribute to closing English language andliteracy disparities between DLLs and English-speaking peers.

Background: Improving children's oral language skills is an important focus of educational research and practice; however, relatively few interventions have demonstrated impacts on these skills. This work makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the effects of language-focused interventions in pre-kindergarten settings by examining impacts on both lower- and higher-level language skills as well as overall language comprehension. Objective: The goal is to assess the impacts of business-as-usual pre-kindergarten with implementation of two versions of an experimental curriculum supplement, Let's Know!, designed to enhance three component language skills (vocabulary, comprehension monitoring, and text-structure knowledge) and overall language comprehension in prekindergarteners. Methods: Eleven pre-kindergarten teachers and 49 low socioeconomic-status students participated. Teachers were randomly assigned to either business-as-usual, Let's Know! Broad, or Let's Know! Deep, unless they participated in a previous pilot study, in which case they were randomly assigned to either Let's Know! Broad or Deep. The Broad version included five different lesson types, whereas the Deep version included three lesson types with additional practice. Children's gains were assessed proximally with measures of vocabulary, comprehension monitoring, and text-structure knowledge and distally with a measure of language comprehension. Results: Children in both experimental versions significantly improved their vocabulary skills relative to children who received business-as-usual instruction. For comprehension monitoring, children who received the Deep and Broad versions improved their scores relative to BAU children for Units 1 and 3, respectively. Improvement in language comprehension was only found for children who received Let's Know! Deep compared with business-as-usual. Conclusion: This study provides initial evidence that the Let's Know! curricula may serve to foster young children's vocabulary, comprehension monitoring, and language comprehension skills. [Additional assistance in the writing of this article was provided by the Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC).] [This article was published in "Child and Youth Care Forum," v45 n3 p367-392 Jun 2016 (see EJ1099507).]

Many preschool language-focused interventions attempt to boost language and literacy skills in young children at risk in these areas of development, though the long-term effects of such interventions are not well-established. This study investigated kindergarten language and reading skills, specifically the subcomponents of vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension, for children exposed to the language-focused intervention "Learning Language and Loving It" (LLLI; Weitzman & Greenberg, 2002) during preschool. End of kindergarten skills were examined, comparing children whose teachers implemented LLLI (n = 25) or business-as-usual (BAU) instruction (n = 24). Hierarchical linear modeling results showed the LLLI intervention to have significant effects on children's decoding and reading comprehension in kindergarten for children who had high levels of language skill at preschool, as compared to their counterparts in the BAU condition. Study findings therefore indicate that preschool language-focused interventions may primarily benefit children with higher skill levels. This suggests the need to explore avenues for addressing the needs of children with relatively low language skills during preschool and the eventual transition to reading. [This article was published in "Applied Developmental Science," v20 n2 p94-107 2016.]

Across languages, back is produced earlier and morefrequently than front. This asymmetry has been attributedeither to a conceptual/semantic asymmetry in the earlymeanings of these locatives (with back being more basic thanfront; conceptual immaturity account) or to the fact that Backconfigurations are inherently more ‘noteworthy’ than Frontconfigurations (pragmatic account). Here, we tested the twoaccounts. In Study 1, children and adult speakers of Englishand Greek described Front/Back motion events. In Study 2,adult speakers of 10 additional languages described the sameevents. Despite cross-linguistic differences, speakers of all ageand language groups typically used more Back than Frontadpositions; furthermore, they often encoded Back informationin occlusion verbs (e.g. hide) but no such verbs were availablefor Front. Thus, the front/back asymmetry is not due tochildren’s conceptual immaturity but should be linked topragmatic factors that also shape adult spatial languageproduction cross-linguistically.

Across languages, children produce locative "back" earlier and more frequently than "front," but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a "semantic misanalysis" explanation, early meanings for "front" and "back" are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion respectively. On an alternative, "pragmatic inference" explanation, visibility and occlusion are simply pragmatic aspects of the meaning of "front" and "back;" the profile of "back" can be explained by the fact that occlusion is more noteworthy compared with visibility. We used cross-linguistic data to test these two hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we examined the production and comprehension of "front/back" by 3- and 4-year-old children and adults speaking two different languages (English and Greek). Children, unlike adults, used "back" more frequently than "front" in both languages; however, no such asymmetry surfaced in the comprehension of the two prepositions. In Experiment 2, both adults and children from the same language groups showed the "front/back" asymmetry when describing a more variable battery of spatial stimuli. Our results support the pragmatic inference hypothesis. We conclude that the emergence of spatial terms does not solely index semantic development but may be linked to pragmatic factors that also shape adults' production of spatial language cross-linguistically.

Language has been shown to influence the ability to formcategories. Here we investigate whether linguistic labels areprivileged compared to other types of cues (e.g., numbers orsymbols), and whether labels exert their effects regardless ofwhether they are introduced intentionally. In a categorizationtask, we found that adults were more likely to use labels to de-termine category boundaries compared to numbers or symbols,and that these effects persisted in all intentionality manipula-tions. These findings suggest that labels have a powerful effecton categorization compared to other cues; most strikingly, la-bels (but not other cues) are used during categorization evenwhen people are specifically asked to ignore them. These re-sults provide novel support for the position that labels indicatecategory membership.

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor-like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English- and Greek-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds used containment expressions (e.g., English "into", Greek "mesa") for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.