With a focus on within-person effects, this study investigated mutualism among academic skills (reading, math, science) and between those skills and verbal working memory in a general population sample and groups with high or low skills from Grades 2 to 5 (2010-2016, N = 859-9040, age 6.27-13.13 years, 49% female, ethnically diverse). Mutualism…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

This article examines the parent intervention program evaluated by Weber et al. (2017) and argues that there are scientific and ethical problems with such intervention efforts in applied developmental science. Scientifically, these programs rely on data from a small and narrow sample of the world's population; assume the existence of fixed…

A child's first words mark the emergence of a uniquely human ability. Theories of the developmental steps that pave the way for word production have proposed that either vocal or gestural precursors are key. These accounts were tested by assessing the developmental synchrony in the onset of babbling, pointing, and word production for 46 infants…

This study used cross-lagged modeling to examine reciprocal relations between maternal and paternal harsh verbal discipline and adolescents' conduct problems and depressive symptoms. Data were from a sample of 976 two-parent families and their children (51% males; 54% European American, 40% African American). Mothers' and fathers'…

Three studies were carried out to investigate sentential complements being the critical device that allows for false-belief understanding in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 102). Participants across studies accurately gazed in anticipation of a character's mistaken belief in a predictive looking task despite erring on verbal responses for direct…

Do infants use past linguistic information to interpret an ambiguous request for an object? When infants in this research were shown 2 objects, and asked for 1 with an indefinite request (e.g., "Can you get it for me?"), both 15- and 18-month-olds used the speaker's previous reference to an absent object to interpret the request. The 18-month-olds…

Young children's understanding of the effects of ambiguous and informative messages on a listener's knowledge is studied in two experiments. (PCB)

Examines the effects of maternal depression on motherese in the face-to-face interactions of 36 mothers and their three- to four-month-old infants. Results indicate that depressed mothers fail to modify their behavior according to the infant's behavior. (RJC)

A sharp improvement in children's understanding of the role of visual perception and linguistic communication in knowledge functions was found between the ages of three and five years. (PCB)

The questions 17 mothers addressed to their children, aged 18-34 months, during a play session were examined for the purpose they served in the conversation and the forms used to express them. (RH)

Videotaped conversations of Spanish-speaking children aged two or four years, first with their mothers and then with each other, were compared. Results support Vygotsky's hypothesis that children's skills in following regulations by others and in regulating others emerge in the social context of conversations. (PCB)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Observed social interactions of 110 Embu children in rural Kenyan community bimonthly between 15 and 30 months of age. Found children who talked frequently, and whose vocalizations were responded to, performed better on assessment measures and showed more positive affect than children who had fewer social interactions or were carried a great deal.…

Both 4- and 7-year-old children readily reformulated their initial messages when explicitly requested to do so by the listener, and both failed to reformulate when confronted only with nonverbal, facial expressions of listener noncomprehension. (Authors)