This study investigated the complex relationship between false-belief (FB) understanding, structural language and pragmatic communication in typically developing children. A total of 78 Finnish children, aged from 4 to 6 years, including an equal number of boys and girls, participated in this study. In the first instance, the study explored the…

Longitudinal research on language abilities and social functioning in young children suggests that gains in one domain affect gains in the other. However, few studies have examined inter-relations of language and social functioning jointly among young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Pre-verbal toddlers with ASD are a group…

Infants' prelinguistic vocalizations reliably organize vocal turn-taking with social partners, creating opportunities for learning to produce the sound patterns of the ambient language. This social feedback loop supporting early vocal learning is well-documented, but its developmental origins have yet to be addressed. When do infants learn that…

Automated methods for processing of daylong audio recordings are efficient and may be an effective way of assessing developmental stage for typically developing children; however, their utility for children with developmental disabilities may be limited by constraints of algorithms and the scope of variables produced. Here, we present a novel…

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and…

Many autistic children require support to meet their learning needs. Given the heterogeneity within the autism spectrum it is plausible that different types of support might be better suited to different children. However, knowledge on what interventions work best for which children is limited. We examined the outcomes of autistic preschool-aged…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who are also minimally verbal may require specialized interventions to promote the development of vocalizations. Preliminary research supports an innovative procedure called response contingent stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) as a potentially effective procedure to promote vocalizations. The primary aim…

This study applies a "within-family, age-snapshot design" to investigate differences between siblings in the development of compliance during the preschool years by disaggregating situational, within-family, and between-family effects. The aim of the study was to investigate the relation between sibling differences in compliance and the…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic syndrome. As with all rare syndromes, obtaining adequately powered sample sizes is a challenge. Here we present legacy data from seven UK labs, enabling the characterisation of cross-sectional and longitudinal developmental trajectories of verbal and non-verbal development in the largest sample of…

With a focus on within-person effects, this study investigated mutualism among academic skills (reading, math, science) and between those skills and verbal working memory in a general population sample and groups with high or low skills from Grades 2 to 5 (2010-2016, N = 859-9040, age 6.27-13.13 years, 49% female, ethnically diverse). Mutualism…

We report two studies that investigated the continuity and stability of maternal mind-mindedness (MM) across different times, contexts, and relationships, and also examined child communicative development in the second year of life. Three main findings emerged. First, the percentages of appropriate mind-related comments (AMRC) decreased between 16…

Parent-child back-and-forth conversation is recognized as important for early development. Accordingly, child media use guidelines encourage parents to co-use media, including mobile media, with children. However, information on the types of conversational interactions that occur during co-use of apps, and the best ways for parents to encourage…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

Our interest is in the development of gratitude as a moral virtue, and its variability across different cultural contexts. Given psychology's overreliance on samples collected from the United Sates, Western Europe, and Australasia, we contrasted patterns of age-related expressions of gratitude among a sample of U.S. 7- to 14-year-old children with…

Baseline child characteristics may predict treatment outcomes in children with or at elevated likelihood of developing autism (EL-ASD). Little is known about the role of child sensory and language features on treatment outcome. Participants were randomly assigned to a parent-mediated intervention or control condition. Analyses explored the…