During human childhood, brain development and body growth compete for limited metabolic resources, resulting in a trade-off where energy allocated to brain development can decrease as body growth accelerates. This preregistered study explores the relationship between language skills, serving as a proxy for brain development, and body mass index at…

The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with the child's verbal skills, an effect that is well known in the literature. However, few studies have examined the effect of older siblings' sex, of the age gap between siblings, of having foreign-speaking parents, as well as the mediating role of parental interaction. Using…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Children differ in how quickly they reach linguistic milestones. Boys typically produce their first multi-word sentences later than girls do. We ask here whether there are sex differences in children's gestures that precede, and presage, these sex differences in speech. To explore this question, we observed 22 girls and 18 boys every 4 months as…

Auditory processing capabilities at the subcortical level have been hypothesized to impact an individual's development of both language and reading abilities. The present study examined whether auditory processing capabilities relate to language development in healthy 9-month-old infants. Participants were 71 infants (31 boys and 40 girls) with…

Hartshorne and Ullman (2006 ) presented naturalistic language data from 25 children (15 boys, 10 girls) and showed that girls produced more past tense overregularization errors than did boys. In particular, girls were more likely to overregularize irregular verbs whose stems share phonological similarities with regular verbs. It was argued that…

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female…