While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…

The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

Vocabulary knowledge is a critical component of school readiness. The current study investigated the extent to which low levels of joint attention in infancy and parent-child book reading across early childhood increase the risk of children having poor vocabulary around the time of school entry. Relevant data from the Longitudinal Study of…