It is widely believed that reading to preschool children promotes their language and literacy skills. Yet, whether early parent-child book reading is an index of generally rich linguistic input or a unique predictor of later outcomes remains unclear. To address this question, we asked whether naturally occurring parent-child book reading…

Previous studies reveal an association between particular features of parental language input and advances in children's language learning. However, it is not known whether parent coaching aimed to enhance specific input components would (a) successfully increase these components in parents' language input and (b) result in concurrent increases in…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

In this paper we examine the relations between parent spatial language input, children's own production of spatial language, and children's later spatial abilities. Using a longitudinal study design, we coded the use of spatial language (i.e. words describing the spatial features and properties of objects; e.g. big, tall, circle, curvy, edge) from…