Inspired by research in language play and linguistic ethnography, this article examines children's language play in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a locally situated generic practice created through children's semiotic repertoires. The article is based on video-recorded linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish day care centre.…

This qualitative ethnographic research explores baby talk (BT) and ontology of infancy in a small, rural Indo-Fijian community via semistructured interviews with mothers about their children's language learning, mothers' narratives about their photographs of their young children engaged in everyday language, and audio- and video-recordings of…

This article explores the role of the reportative BIN in Yucatec Maya language acquisition and socialization among children aged 4 years and above, focusing on their interactions during pretend play. Building upon prior research on caregivers' strategic use of BIN, the study aims to elucidate the nuanced meanings and functions of the reportative…

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

The association between monolingual children's early language abilities and their later reading performance is well established. However, for English language learners, the pattern of associations between early language skills and later literacy is much less well understood for English language learners. This study examined language predictors of…