This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Relations among indices of maternal mind-mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind-related comments) and children's: (a) internal state vocabulary and perspectival symbolic play at 26 months ("N" = 206), and (b) theory of mind (ToM) at 51 months ("n" = 161) were investigated. Appropriate comments were positively…

Associations between parenting quality and 3-year-olds' school readiness, receptive, and expressive language were examined in relation to the amount of time they spent in childcare, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364). Associations for school readiness and receptive language were stronger among…

In a prospective study of developmental outcomes in relation to early-life otitis media, behavioral, cognitive, and language measures were administered to a large, diverse sample of children at 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9-11 years of age (N = 741). At 9-11 years of age, 9% of the children were categorized as having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder…

The concurrent and predictive relations of sensorimotor behavior and play to language in the second year were assessed among 19 preterm and 20 full-term infants tested at 13 1/2 and 22 months of age. Numerous associations between play and language were identified; sensorimotor behavior and language in the same age period were relatively loosely…

Examines the development of infants' ability to begin recognizing novel referents of common object names. In particular, the present experiment investigated the development of 12- to 20-month-old infants' ability to infer that an unfamiliar but categorically related object can be designated by a newly learned name for the object class. (Author/RH)

Examined morphosyntax in persons with Williams Syndrome (WS). Analyzed receptive language of English-speaking WS persons and grammatical gender assignment of French-speaking WS persons. Found within-domain dissociations in grammatical gender assignment across several sentence elements and difficulties in understanding embedded sentences, which…