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.…

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…

This paper reviews and synthesizes research into the ways in which parents support their child across three major developmental domains in early childhood: early language, play and early literacy. We show how these domains are linked to each other and suggest that there is some evidence that interventions in all of them will promote mutual…

"Play-based interventions" are practices designed to improve socio-emotional, physical, language, and cognitive development through guided interactive play. During play sessions, an interventionist uses strategies including modeling, verbal redirection, reinforcement, and indirect instruction to sustain and encourage child play…

Children with developmental disabilities benefit from their language environment as much as, or even more than, typically developing (TD) children, but maternal language directed to developmentally delayed children is an underinvestigated topic. The purposes of the present study were to compare maternal functional language directed to children…

Teacher talk is a powerful classroom tool. Studies document the importance of teacher language in children's development, in early literacy development, in children's perceptions of self and others, and in facilitating play. This article examines "teacher talk" and its elements--kinds of language, functions of language, promoting children's…

Indirect effects of preschool classroom indexes of teacher talk were tested on fourth-grade outcomes for 57 students from low-income families in a longitudinal study of classroom and home influences on reading. Detailed observations and audiotaped teacher and child language data were coded to measure content and quantity of verbal interactions in…

To assess the effectiveness of providing training in elaborative, emotion rich reminiscing (emotional reminiscing, ER) as an adjunct to Parent Management Training (PMT) for parents of children (N = 38, M age = 56.9, SD = 15.8 months) with oppositional behaviors. "Control" parents received PMT and non-language adjunct intervention, child-directed…

Using a discourse analytic approach from the work of Hoey (1991) and a dual processing model from Wray (2000), this paper compares the language produced by the same classes of children when they are engaged in role-play and when they are playing rule-based games. We find that role-play tends to be richer in "frozen" pair parts, where the responses…

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of "what is" and "what if." Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for…

Three questions were asked that explored the linguistic fine-tuning hypothesis and how parents might model language: (i) do parents significantly tune to their children's productive language or non-verbal cognition during play? (ii) is the level of the linguistic tuning different in the Down syndrome (DS) population compared to a typically…

Although child maltreatment has often been described as leading to language deficits, the few well-controlled investigations of language acquisition in maltreated children have focused on language content rather than form, or have used qualitative rather than quantitative measures. This study examines syntactic complexity in 19 maltreated and 14…