Children learn language by listening to speech from caregivers around them. However, the type and quantity of speech input that children are exposed to change throughout early childhood in ways that are poorly understood due to the small samples (few participants, limited hours of observation) typically available in developmental psychology. Here…

Purpose: Autistic individuals often face challenges perceiving and expressing emotions, potentially stemming from differences in speech prosody. Here we explore how autism diagnoses between groups, and measures of social competence within groups may be related to, first, children's speech characteristics (both prosodic features and amount of…

Joint attention and imitation are thought to facilitate a developmental cascade of language and social communication skills. Delays in developing these skills may affect the quality of children's social interactions and subsequent language development. We examined how responding to joint attention and object imitation skills predicted rate of…

We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from…

This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to…

The goal of the current study was to investigate whether children's social information processing (SIP) predicts their conversations with peers, including both their remarks to peers and peers' remarks to them. When children (N = 156; 55% male; United States; Representation by Race: 60% African American, 18% Mixed race, 15% European American, 7%…

Purpose: Fathers play a critical but underresearched role in their children's cognitive and linguistic development. Focusing on two-parent families with a mother and a father, the present longitudinal study explores the amount of paternal input infants hear during the first 2 years of life, how this input changes over time, and how it relates to…

The maternal language input literature suggests that mothers with more education use a greater quantity and complexity of language with their young children compared to mothers with less education although race and socioeconomic status have been confounded in most studies because of small sample sizes. The current Family Life study included a…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to describe and explain changes in severity of speech sound disorder (SSD) and token-to-token inconsistency in children with high levels of inconsistency. Method: Thirty-nine children (aged 4;6-7;11 [years;months]) with SSDs and high levels of token-to-token inconsistency were assessed every 6 months for 2 years…

This study examines the role of the lexicon and grammatical structure building in early grammar. Parent-report data in CDI format from a sample of 1151 German-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6 and longitudinal spontaneous speech data from 22 children between 1;8 and 2;5 were used. Regression analysis of the parent-report data indicates that…

Both walking abilities and pointing gestures in infants are associated with later language skills. Within this longitudinal study we investigate the relationship between walk onset and first observed index-finger points and their respectively predictive value for later language skills. We assume that pointing as a motor as well as a communicative…

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk--talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend--at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text…

The current study examined the interaction between maternal depressive symptoms and child temperament in predicting subsequent child language skills. Participants were 252 mother-child dyads recruited from the All Our Families longitudinal cohort, a primarily middle-class sample (62.9% completed postsecondary education) from Alberta, Canada (90.5%…

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We…