How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

This epidemiologic study estimated the prevalence of specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual English-speaking kindergarten children. From a stratified cluster sample in rural, urban, and ...

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Prevalence of Specific Language Impairment in Kindergarten Children

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) were for many years treated as distinct disorders but are now often regarded as different manifestations of the same underlying problem, differing only in severity or developmental stage. The merging of these categories has been motivated by the reconceptualization of dyslexia as a language disorder in which phonological processing is deficient. The authors argue that this focus underestimates the independent influence of semantic and syntactic deficits, which are widespread in SLI and which affect reading comprehension and impair attainment of fluent reading in adolescence. The authors suggest that 2 dimensions of impairment are needed to conceptualize the relationship between these disorders and to capture phenotypic features that are important for identifying neurobiologically and etiologically coherent subgroups.

/pdf/developmental-dyslexia-and-specific-language-impairment-same-3mkl221ou7.pdf

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment: same or different?

This investigation examined the reading outcomes of children with language impairments (LI). A large subsample of children who participated in an epidemiologic study of language impairments in kind...

A Longitudinal Investigation of Reading Outcomes in Children with Language Impairments.

A brief, processing-dependent, nonword repetition task, designed to minimize biases associated with traditional language tests, was investigated In Study 1, no overlap in nonword repetition perfor

Nonword Repetition and Child Language Impairment.

A valid and reliable diagnostic standard for language impairment is required for the conduct of epidemiologic research on specific language disorder. A rationale is provided for such a diagnostic s...

A system for the diagnosis of specific language impairment in kindergarten children.

The diagnostic decision-making standards used by practicing clinicians to determine language impairment were investigated. Randomly selected ASHA members who worked with children were asked to revi...

Clinical Decision Making: Describing the Decision Rules of Practicing Speech-Language Pathologists

Two sets of diagnostic measures were administered to a group of 35 adults with welldocumented histories of specific language impairment and to a control group of 35 normal language users. These mea...

Diagnosing specific language impairment in adults for the purpose of pedigree analysis.

When a child is diagnosed as having a language disorder, parents may ask the speech-language pathologist questions such as "How might this language disorder affect my child’s life?" Unfortunately, ...

Nancy L. Records

Papers

Prevalence of Specific Language Impairment in Kindergarten Children

A system for the diagnosis of specific language impairment in kindergarten children.

Clinical Decision Making: Describing the Decision Rules of Practicing Speech-Language Pathologists

Diagnosing specific language impairment in adults for the purpose of pedigree analysis.

The Quality of Life of Young Adults With Histories of Specific Language Impairment