The aim of this study was to develop a measurement approach to assess the learning opportunities provided by parents to their young children with autism spectrum disorder during a free play task and to examine the relationship between learning opportunities and child performance on measures of cognition, autism spectrum disorder symptoms, and…

Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns' changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n…

Vocabulary checklists completed by caregivers are a common way of measuring children's vocabulary knowledge. We provide evidence from checklist data from 31 children with and without autism spectrum disorder. When asked to report twice about whether or not their child produces a particular word, caregivers are largely consistent in their…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Purpose: This study examined vocabulary profiles in young cochlear implant (CI) recipients and in children with normal hearing (NH) matched on receptive vocabulary size to improve our understanding of young CI recipients' acquisition of word categories (e.g., common nouns or closed-class words). Method: We compared receptive and expressive…

Parent input during interaction with young children varies across languages and contexts with regard to the relative number of words from different lexical categories, particularly nouns and verbs. Previous work has focused on spoken language input. Little is known about the lexical composition of parent input in American Sign Language (ASL). We…

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants' and toddlers' communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children's communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The…

This study examined longitudinal growth in gestures and words in infants at heightened (HR) versus low risk (LR) for ASD. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory was administered monthly from 8 to 14 months and at 18 and 24 months to caregivers of 14 HR infants diagnosed with ASD (HR-ASD), 27 HR infants with language delay (HR-LD),…

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…

Purpose: We sought to identify factors predictive of or associated with receipt of speech/language services during early childhood. We did so by analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; Andreassen & Fletcher, 2005), a nationally representative dataset maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. We…

In order to address gaps in the literature surrounding the acquisition of translation equivalents (TEs) in young bilinguals, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, TEs were measured in the expressive vocabularies of thirty-four French-English bilinguals at 1;4, 1;10, and 2;6 using the MacArthur Bates CDI. Children's acquisition of TEs…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

Purpose: This study investigated within-language and between-language associations between phonological memory, vocabulary, and grammar in French-English (n = 43) and Spanish-English (n = 25) bilingual children at 30, 36, and 48 months. It was predicted that phonological memory would display both within-language and between-language relations to…

Background: Language outcomes for children with cochlear implants (CIs) vary widely, even for those implanted before 2 years of age. Identifying the main influencing factors that account for some of the variability is important in order to provide information to guide appropriate clinical and intervention services for young children with CIs.…

Young children who hear more child-directed speech (CDS) tend to have larger vocabularies later in childhood, but the specific characteristics of CDS underlying this link are currently underspecified. The present study sought to elucidate how the structure of language input boosts learning by investigating whether repetition of object labels in…