Using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (n = 1364), we examined how experiences in early childcare (ECE) and in families from 6 to 54 months predicted the development of first-grade prosocial behaviour (PSB), a core component of social and emotional success. SEM analyses revealed several key pathways: (1) both ECE process quality and…

When toddlers hear a novel word, they quickly and independently link it with a novel object rather than known-name objects. However, they are less proficient in retaining multiple novel words. Sleep and even short naps can enhance declarative memory in adults and children and this study investigates the effect of napping on children's memory for…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to identify predictors of expressive vocabulary in young Spanish-speaking children who are deaf or hard of hearing living in the United States. Method: This cross-sectional study considered 53 children with bilateral hearing loss between 8 and 34 months of age ( M = 24, SD = 6.9). Demographic variables,…

Purpose: Infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer play actions and gestures than neurotypical infants (e.g., Mastrogiuseppe et al., 2015; Veness et al., 2012; Zwaigenbaum et al., 2005). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether different "types" of actions and gestures are more or less likely to develop…

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 aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally. Method: The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in…

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…

Despite the common intuition that labeling may be the best way to teach a new word to a child, systematic testing is needed of the prediction that children learn words better from labeling utterances than from directive utterances. Two experiments compared toddlers' label learning in the context of hearing words used in directive versus labeling…

This study reports child and family outcomes from a community-based, quasi-experimental pilot trial of "Project ImPACT for Toddlers" ("PI[superscript T]"). "PI[superscript T]" is a parent-mediated, naturalistic, developmental behavioral intervention for children with or at-risk for autism spectrum disorder developed…

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…

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…

To examine early developments in other-oriented resource sharing, fifty-one 18- and 24-month-old children were administered 6 tasks with toys or food that could be shared with an adult playmate who had none. On each task the playmate communicated her desire for the items in a series of progressively more explicit cues. Twenty-four-month-olds…

Children with developmental disabilities (DD) may experience delays in their ability to speak and communicate with their parents, peers, and others. These children often benefit from evidence-based, parent-implemented communication interventions. In the current study, two mothers were trained and coached to use storybook reading techniques and…

Although a bilingual advantage has been reported for various measures of cognitive control, most previous studies have looked at a limited range of cognitive control measures. Furthermore, they typically leave unaddressed whether positive effects of bilingualism hold for all bilinguals or whether these are modulated by differences in bilingual…