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…

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…

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…

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…

Examines the possible developmental relationship between unimanual handedness and duplicated syllable babbling. Thirty infants were tested at weekly intervals between five months of age and eight weeks after the onset of duplicated syllable babbling. Results suggest developmental change in hemispheric specialization or at least asymmetrical…

Preschoolers' performance on two tasks demonstrated that, given a perceptually available set of dolls, they were able to use number words to determine the quantity of a hidden or nonexistent set of items that was in a known ratio to the available set. (MM)

Twelve two year olds were taught novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Children's interpretation of the relations between the nouns was mediated by the similarity of the objects, a result that suggests that, by age two, children have the conceptual and lexical abilities necessary for establishing hierarchical relations. (LB)

Tested 59 three-year olds three times over seven months to assess the contribution of development of theory of mind and language to one another. Found that earlier language abilities predicted later theory-of-mind test performance (controlling for earlier theory of mind), but earlier theory-of-mind did not predict later language-test performance…

Explores the relations among combinatorial capacities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and nonsemantic action sequences within a sample of 18- to 24-month-old children, as well as assessing the developmental level of a selected subset of concepts. (HOD)

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 1 hour of conversation between 12 mothers and their 23-month-old children. Children were more likely to imitate correct grammatical morphemes after mothers' corrective recasting of children's errors than after three types of maternal responses that did not correct an error but did model a morpheme. (BC)

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)

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…

Sampled the speech of American, French, and Swedish mothers to their one-year olds, to analyze distribution of phonetic parameters of adult speech, as well as children's own early words. Found that variability is greater in child words than in adult speech, and mother-child dyads showed no evidence of specific maternal influence on phonetics of…

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of young English-, French-, and Korean-speaking children showed that, across the three languages, children go through three similar developmental stages before they acquire the adult system of answering negative questions. Several language-specific phenomena were observed. (BC)