Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object)…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity of three sentence-focused diversity measures, intransitive verb diversity, transitive verb diversity, and third person (3P) subject diversity, using two methods: (a) group differentiation of late-talking (LT) toddlers from peers with typically developing (TD) language and…

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) predicts that people adjust their language to match that of the other to promote comprehension, coordinate action, and facilitate harmonious relationships. CAT predicts that mothers will adjust their sentence length and complexity to match those of children. Prior tests of CAT confounded trait-like language…

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of…

In early childhood centres, decontextualised talk is often associated with literacy activities. In this study, however, we investigated toddler-educator conversations across various activities with a focus on those about topics that were not related to the immediate context. We examined the communicative purposes and linguistic features of these…

With the explosive growth in time spent on YouTube by babies and toddlers, it's important to analyze what they're watching on YouTube. Indexes that evaluate the contents of YouTube channels for infants and toddlers have been developed, but since those were evaluation-based indexes of educators and parents, it is difficult to find out what content…

Research suggests that elements of the family environment may have significant associations with cognitive and language development outcomes. Less is known, however, about the family environment in peri-urban China, where rates of cognitive and language delay in children aged 0-3 years are as high as 51% and 54%, respectively. Using data collected…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Background: Use of numerical and spatial language, also known as math talk, is critical to the development of foundational number and spatial skills in early childhood. However, caregivers and children of low socioeconomic status (SES) tend to use less math talk than their higher-SES peers. Objective: The current efficacy study tested the…

This study examines the role of language environment (number of conversational turns) in the development of socioemotional competencies between 18 and 30 months. The language environment of 43 infants and their social-emotional competencies were measured at 18 months and again at 30 months. Multiple regressions showed a significant contribution of…

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input…

The increasing societal and linguistic diversity in schools challenge traditional teaching approaches and call for pedagogies that cater to the growing number of multilingual pupils. Translanguaging pedagogies can offer multilinguals a productive learning environment that helps them leverage their resources for learning. Translanguaging studies in…

The purpose of this study was to identify malleable practices in the homes of Spanish-speaking toddlers prior to school enrollment. This was achieved by examining daily activities and routines and the role older siblings played in these interactions to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the home language and literacy environment and…

Children learn math concepts long before they enter school. Across all cultures, children are exposed to number and spatial language to varying degrees during everyday home routines. Yet most studies of math talk occur in the lab and target non-Hispanic, English-speaking families. We expanded inquiry to the spontaneous math language (i.e., number…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been found to be beneficial for the development of children below three years. However, many children do not attend ECEC facilities. Frequently, structural family characteristics (SFC), such as migration background, educational attainment and income, are used to explain differing probabilities of…