The number of U.S. children living in households with extended families has greatly increased in the last 4 decades. This demographic shift calls for a reevaluation of the impact of household size on children's development. Household density (HHD), measured as the ratio of people to bedrooms in a home, has been shown to negatively relate to…

Although early life experiences of language and parenting are critical for children's development, large home observation studies of both domains are scarce in the psychological literature, presumably because of their considerable costs to the participants and researchers. Here, we used digital audio-recorders to unobtrusively observe 107…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

We compared language comprehension and production across the second year of life in children of clinically depressed mothers who later remitted with children of nondepressed mothers. Altogether, 157 mother-child dyads participated: 46 with mothers diagnosed at infant age 5 months as having major, minor, or other depressive disorders who fully…

This study aimed to test a 5-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children's school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness…

Although children's use of speech registers such as Baby Talk is well documented, little is known about their understanding of Foreigner Talk, a register addressed to non-native speakers. In Study 1, 4- to 8-year-old children and adults (N = 125) heard 4 registers (Foreigner Talk, Baby Talk, Peer Talk, and Teacher Talk) and predicted who would…

Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do…

Understanding the role of negative emotionality in the development of executive functioning (EF) and language skills can help identify developmental windows that may provide promising opportunities for intervention. In addition, because EF and language skills are, in part, genetically influenced, intergenerational transmission patterns are…

Recent studies demonstrate that emerging literacy depends on earlier language achievement. Importantly, most extant work focuses on "parent-reported production" prior to 30 months of age. Of interest is whether and how "directly assessed vocabulary comprehension" in the 2nd year of life supports vocabulary and kindergarten…

Is "two" ever a plural marker in child language? By some accounts, children bootstrap the distinction between the words "one" and "two" by observing their use with singular-plural marking ("one ball/two balls"). Others argue that the numeral "two" marks plurality before children begin using numerals to denote precise quantities. We tested the…

This study examined the relations among socioeconomic status (SES), early phonological processing, vocabulary, and reading in 262 children from diverse SES backgrounds followed from ages 4 to 9 in Beijing, China. SES contributed to variations in phonological skills and vocabulary in children's early development. Nonetheless, early phonological and…

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…

This study investigates vocal imitation of prosodic contour in ongoing spontaneous interaction with 10- to 13-week-old infants. Audio recordings from naturalistic interactions between 20 mothers and infants were analyzed using a vocalization coding system that extracted the pitch and duration of individual vocalizations. Using these data, the…

This study examined mother-child shared book reading behaviors before and after participation in a random-assignment responsive parenting intervention called Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) that occurred during infancy (PALS I), the toddler-preschool (PALS II) period, or both as compared with a developmental assessment (DAS) intervention (DAS…

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that…