This brief provides policymakers and practitioners with a comprehensive overview of the purpose, characteristics, uses, and types of Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEAs). It emphasizes the importance of high-quality KEAs in guiding instructional practices and assessing developmental progress in young learners. It highlights that high-quality KEAs…

Children need to learn the demands of their native language in the early vocabulary development phase. In this dynamic process, parental multimodal input may shape neurodevelopmental trajectories while also being tailored by child-related factors. Moving beyond typically characterized group profiles, in this article, we synthesize growing evidence…

This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

Jeremy Sawyer recounts that, after Lev S. Vygotsky's death, Jean Piaget conceded the Russian psychologist correctly understood the social origins, functions, and developmental trajectory of children's egocentric speech (now called private speech) but dismissed this work as irrelevant to children's egocentrism or nondifferentiation of perspectives.…

Children learn high phonological neighbourhood density words more easily than low phonological neighbourhood density words (Storkel, 2004). However, the strength of this effect relative to alternative predictors of word acquisition is unclear. We addressed this issue using communicative inventory data from 300 British English-speaking children…

A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

This study aimed to test a 5-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children's school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness…

The Coaching Early Conversation Interaction and Language (CECIL) Project, which started in September 2020, has focused on exploring coaching-led approaches to support the effective implementation of early language interventions, especially in Private, Voluntary & Independent (PVI) settings. At the core of the CECIL approach is a way of…

Conversation analysis (CA) can be a useful tool for research when investigating toddlers' social interactions, because it can showcase their capabilities and agency through in-depth analysis of their verbal and non-verbal actions. This article argues that by using CA to analyse the details of toddler conversations within the peer group, we can not…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise…

This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different…

In the period between sole use of single words and majority use of multiword utterances, children draw from their existing productive capability and conversational input to facilitate the eventual outcome of majority use of multiword utterances. During this period, children use word combinations that are not yet mature multiword utterances, termed…

Two studies examined whether preschool children preferred to select a moving object over stationary objects when determining the referent of a novel word. In both studies three- and four-year-olds observed three novel objects, one moving object and two stationary objects. In Study 1, children (n=44) were asked to select the object that best…