The Japanese language has single/geminate obstruents characterized by durational difference in closure/frication as part of the phonemic repertoire used to distinguish word meanings. We first evaluated infants' abilities to discriminate naturally uttered single/geminate obstruents (/pata/ and /patta/) using the visual habituation-dishabituation…

The stability of language across childhood is traditionally assessed by exploring longitudinal relations between individual language measures. However, language encompasses many domains and varies with different sources (child speech, parental report, experimenter assessment). This study evaluated individual variation in multiple age-appropriate…

Children (N = 157) 4 to 8 years old participated 1 time (single) or 4 times (repeated) in an interactive event. Across each condition, half were questioned a week later about the only or a specific occurrence of the event ("depth first") and then about what usually happens. Half were prompted in the reverse order ("breadth first"). Children with…

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed past events with their mothers and completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and understanding of knowledge. Found that theory-of-mind scores were related to memory conversation participation, independent of age and linguistic skill, and to the frequency of…

Examined mothers' and preschoolers' emotion talk for age- and gender-related patterns in use of labels and explanations. Found that children used emotion words mainly in labels. Boys' emotion talk increased with age. The youngest girls had more emotion talk than same-age boys. Mothers used more explanations than labels with boys but similar…

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Measures of vocabulary, phonological memory, nonverbal intelligence, and reading were taken from 80 children at ages 4, 5, 6, and 8 years. Comparisons revealed a significant shift in the causal underpinnings of the relationship between phonological memory and vocabulary development before and after age five. (Author/LB)

Mothers in Argentina, France, Japan, and the United States were observed interacting with their 5- and 13-month-old infants. Maternal speech was classified into expressions concerning affect and information. Mothers in all cultures used both classifications with their infants and spoke to older infants more than younger infants. (BC)

Used a cross-sectional natural language database to investigate the parent-child conversations of 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. Found that 4-year-olds and, to a greater extent, 5-year olds reliably used explicit contrastives. All the children regularly elicited mentalistic responses from their parents and, in some cases, these parental responses were…

Two sets of meta-analyses examined gender effects on parents' observed language with their children. Findings indicated that mothers talked more, used more supportive and negative speech, and less directive and informing speech than fathers. Mothers talked more and used more supportive speech with daughters than sons. Effect sizes depended on…