The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between paternal attitudes, father-child activities, socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors, and the early child productive vocabulary. We also wanted to study if paternal factors affected boys' and girls' language acquisition differently. Our data consisted of 722 fathers and their…

The present study examined the dyadic nature of fathers' and mothers' reported frequency of storybook reading by testing (1) the longitudinal association in parents' frequency of storybook reading when their children were 10.47 months old and 52.95 months old, (2) the interdependence between both parents' reported frequency of storybook reading,…

The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

Previous research has shown that the quality of mother-child interactions between pre-term children and their mothers tends to be poorer than that of full-term children and their mothers (Forcada-Guex, Pierrehumbert, Borghini, Moessinger & Muller-Nix, 2006). Mothers of pre-term children are less responsive and more intrusive in interactions…

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development…

Background: Children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT) frequently show problems in language development. However, a clear description of the communicative patterns of these children is still lacking. Aims: To describe the first stages of language development in children with SCT in comparison with those in typically developing (TD) children. The…

Trajectories of expressive language development are highly heterogeneous in autism. Yoder et al. found that parental responsiveness, child response to joint attention, child communicative intent and consonant inventory were unique predictors of expressive language growth in minimally verbal preschoolers 16 months later (n = 87). This study applied…

This study explored individual variability in the bilingual vocabularies of 65 Maltese children aged 23-27 months (N = 33) and 30-34 months (N = 32). Most of the participants' direct input consisted of Maltese sentences embedding English words. Bilingualism was present at the societal level. Word production was measured through parental report,…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

This is the first study of a large sample of Bulgarian-speaking toddlers and their communicative development. A Bulgarian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Words and Sentences was used to obtain parent report data on 153 children between the ages of 20 and 30 months. Lexical and grammatical development were…

Purpose: The goals of this study were to quantify longitudinal expectations for verb lexicon growth and to determine whether verb lexicon measures were better predictors of later grammatical outcomes than noun lexicon measures. Method: Longitudinal parent-report measures from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al.,…

Generalizability and decision studies provide a mathematical framework for quantifying the stability of a given number of measurements. This approach is especially relevant to the task of obtaining a representative measure of communicative behavior in young children and supports an alternative to the debate regarding which type of assessment…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (short form) was adapted for Samoan and Tongan speakers in New Zealand. The adaptation process drew upon language samples from Samoan and Tongan parent-child dyads with 20- and 26-month-old children and adult informants. The resulting 100-word language inventories in Samoan and Tongan, plus a…

Background: Research findings on vocabulary development in children with Down syndrome are inconsistent. This study aimed to analyse the developmental trend of vocabulary growth in children with Down syndrome and the relationships between vocabulary and chronological and developmental age. Method: Children's vocabulary size was assessed by a…

This study investigated the potential interrelationship between parental (maternal) and expert assessments of the expressive and receptive language skills of 12- to 18-month-old children. The language activities of 27 children were monitored by their mothers (MCDI scale: Lyytinen, 2000. "Varhaisen kommunikaation ja kielen kehityksen…