The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word…

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development…

Background and Aims: The purpose of this exploratory study was to expand existing literature on prelinguistic vocalizations by reporting results of the first home-based longitudinal study examining a wide variety of behaviors and characteristics, including early vocalizations, across infants at low and elevated risk of autism spectrum disorder…

Purpose: Early motor abilities (gesture, oral motor, and gross/fine skills) are related to language abilities, and this is not due to an association with cognitive or symbolic abilities: Oral motor skills are uniquely associated with language abilities at 21 months of age. It is important to determine whether this motor-language relationship…

We aimed to evaluate the validity of the Ages and Stages Questionnaires Edition 3 (ASQ-3) and the MacArthur communicative development inventory (CDI) as a screening measure for children at risk of language development delay in western rural China, by comparing them to the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID-III). We administered…

We compared language comprehension and production across the second year of life in children of clinically depressed mothers who later remitted with children of nondepressed mothers. Altogether, 157 mother-child dyads participated: 46 with mothers diagnosed at infant age 5 months as having major, minor, or other depressive disorders who fully…

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…

Purpose: Differences in communication development impact long-term outcomes of children with autism. Previous research has identified factors associated with communication in children with autism, but much of the variance in communication skill remains unexplained. It has been proposed that early differences in sensory responsiveness (i.e.,…

Purpose: To extend our knowledge about factors influencing early vocabulary development for infants with cochlear implants (CIs), we investigated the impact of positive parenting behaviors (PPBs) from the Indicator of Parent Child Interaction, used in parent-child interactions during everyday activities. Method: Implantation age for the sample…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to develop a valid and reliable screening tool to identify children with risk of developing language difficulties for Estonian-speaking 2- to 3-year-old children. Method: Nine hundred ninety parents of children ages 1;8-3;1 (years;months) filled in the Estonian MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development…

This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were…

Previous research indicates that infant-directed speech (IDS) is usually slower than adult-directed speech (ADS) and mothers prefer placing a focused word in isolation or utterance-final position in (English) IDS, which may benefit word learning. This study investigated the speaking rate and word position of IDS in two typologically-distinct…

Assessing a child's language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…