Purpose: Early motor abilities (gesture, oral motor, and gross/fine skills) are related to language abilities, and this is not due to an association with cognitive or symbolic abilities: Oral motor skills are uniquely associated with language abilities at 21 months of age. It is important to determine whether this motor-language relationship…

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) need a supportive family environment to facilitate language development. The present study was designed to assess the effects of parent training (PT) on enhancing children's communication development. The PT was based on the "It Takes Two to Talk" model, with specific adaptations for families of…

Previous research has shown that home environment plays an important role in children's early language skills. Yet, few researchers have examined the unique role of family-level factors (socioeconomic status [SES], household chaos) on children's learning or focused on the longitudinal processes that might explain their relations to children's…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) are at higher risk for both delayed expressive language and poor speech intelligibility. The current study utilized the quantitative automated language environment analysis (LENA) to depict mother and child vocalizations and conversational patterns in the home of 43 children with DS, chronologically aged 24-64…

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

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…

This study investigated the role of language exposure in vocabulary acquisition in Irish, a threatened minority language in Ireland which is usually acquired with English in a bilingual context. Using a bilingual Irish-English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories) [Fenson, L., V. A. Marchman, D. J. Thal, P. S.…

Little is known about outcomes of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder reared in bilingual homes. There are concerns that social communication deficits among children with autism spectrum disorder may reduce the developmental benefits of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder raised in bilingual…

This study examines the effect of certain socio-cultural factors of the family environment on the language of toddlers and children in early childhood. The sample included 86 families with one- to six-year-old children. The data on the social, economic, and cultural factors of the family environment, parental reading literacy, parental knowledge…

Changes in natural language environments of families receiving quantitative language feedback in Shanghai were investigated. Volunteer parents of 22 children aged 5 to 30 months were recruited from a hospital and a learning center. Quantitative measures of adult word count and conversational turns with children were collected regularly over 6…

This longitudinal assessment concentrated on the relation between the home literacy environment (HLE) and early language acquisition during infancy and toddlerhood. In study 1, after controlling for socio-economic status, a broadly defined HLE predicted language comprehension in 50 infants. In study 2, 27 children returned for further analyses.…

Children's emergent language develops in a rich context of varied influences afforded by their familial and social environments. Using data collected during a longitudinal prospective service project, this study examined the direct and indirect contributions of parenting knowledge and practices and maternal postnatal depression on emergent…

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.…