Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

For the last 20 years, developmental psychologists have measured the variability in lexical development of infants and toddlers using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs)--the most widely used parental report forms for assessing language and communication skills in infants and toddlers. We show that CDI reports can…

Deferred imitation and early social communication skills were compared among speaking and nonspeaking children with autism and children developing typically. Overall, the children with autism showed a lower frequency on measures of deferred imitation and social communication compared with typically developing children. Deferred imitation was…

Prospective questionnaire data from a longitudinal population sample on children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), developmental delay, specific language impairment, or typical development (TD), were collected at ages eight, 12 and 24 months, via the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scale Developmental Profile (CSBS)--Infant Toddler…

This article addresses the acquisition of meaning of words and phrases that refer to aspects of the world that are not directly perceivable. It examines the patterns of semantic input that are available in the linguistic environment that provide clues to allow a child to construct a lexicon that is both broad and deep. These patterns are…

As welfare-to-work reforms increase women's labor market attachment, the lives of their young children are likely to change. This note draws on a random-assignment experiment in Connecticut to ask whether mothers' rising employment levels and program participation are associated with changes in young children's early learning and cognitive growth.…

This study examined parental report as a source of information about toddlers' productive vocabulary in 105 low-income families living in either urban or rural communities. Parental report using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Short Form (CDI) at child age 2;0 was compared to concurrent spontaneous speech measures and…

Approximately 400,000 preschool children have a major neurodevelopmental disorder impacting on mobility, cognitive-adaptive, or communicative skills. As many as 1 in 3 children live at psychosocial disadvantage because of poverty, parental mental illness or substance misuse, or low parental educational (i.e. less than high school). In the past…