Differences in vocabulary that children bring with them to school can be traced back to the gestures they produced at the age of 1;2, which, in turn, can be traced back to the gestures their parents produced at the same age (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009a). We ask here whether child gesture can be experimentally increased and, if so, whether the…

Infant-parent interactions are bidirectional; therefore, it is important to understand how infants' communicative behavior elicits variable responses from caregivers and, in turn, how infants' behavior varies with caregivers' responses; furthermore, how these moment-to-moment interactive behaviors relate to later language development. The current…

Recent work has shown that children have detailed phonological representations of consonants at both word-initial and word-final edges. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether onsets and codas are equally represented by young learners since word edges are isomorphic with syllable edges in this work. The current study sought to explore toddler's…

Researchers have suggested that as children's language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations…

Thirty infants at 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while playing for 18 minutes. Experimental stimuli were presented in three communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative, proto-imperative, and ambiguous--to elicit infant communicative bids that did and did not contain gestures. Mothers' responses were analyzed, and their verbal responses…