Over two decades ago, the "30-million-word" gap rose to prominence after work by Hart & Risley (1995) suggested that children from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) heard fewer words than their peers from families with higher SES during their first 4 years of life. Recent research challenges the magnitude and even…

Most U.S. preschoolers have consumed media created with funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Ready To Learn (RTL) initiative, which was established to promote school readiness among children ages 2-8. Synthesizing data from 45 evaluations (N = 24,624 unique child participants), this meta-analysis examined the effects of RTL media…

This article examined longitudinal relations among socioeconomic risk, maternal language input, child vocabulary, and child executive function (EF) in a large sample (N = 1,009) recruited for a prospective longitudinal study. Two measures of maternal language input derived from a parent-child picture book task, vocabulary diversity (VOCD), and…

In response to Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, and Hirsh-Pasek's (2018) commentary, we clarify our goals, outline points of agreement and disagreement between our respective positions, and address the inadvertently harmful consequences of the word gap claim. We maintain that our study constitutes a serious empirical challenge to the word…

Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) aim to debunk what is called the 30-million-word gap by claiming that children from lower income households hear more speech than Hart and Risley ([Hart, B., 1995]) reported. We address why the 30-million-word gap should not be abandoned, and the importance of retaining focus on the vital ingredient to language…

Does early gesture use predict later productive and receptive vocabulary in children with pre- or perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL)? Eleven children with PL were categorized into 2 groups based on whether their gesture at 18 months was within or below the range of typically developing (TD) children. Children with PL whose gesture was within…

Recent accounts of language acquisition propose that the knowledge structures that comprise language develop within a single, unified system that shares computational resources and representations. One implication of this approach is that developmental relations within the system become central to theorizing about language acquisition. Previous…

There is ongoing debate about children's ability to use subsequently acquired language to describe preverbal experiences. This issue was addressed experimentally in this investigation using a novel paradigm. Two-year-old children who lacked color words were individually taught to activate a bubble machine by selecting a particular color of bubble…

Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the…

Effects of early child care on children's functioning from 4 1/2 years through the end of 6th grade (M age=12.0 years) were examined in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n=1,364). The results indicated that although parenting was a stronger and more consistent predictor of…

This paper reports evidence from a longitudinal study in which children's attention to shape in a laboratory task of artificial noun learning was correlated with a rate shift in noun acquisitions. Eight children were tested in the laboratory at 3-week intervals beginning when they had less than 25 nouns in their productive vocabulary (M age=17…

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Dale, 1996; Fenson et al., 1994), parent reports about language skills, are being used increasingly in studies of theoretical and public health importance. This study (N=113) correlated scores on the CDI at ages 2 and 3 years with scores at age 3 years on tests of cognition and…