Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

We examined the functions of mothers' speech to infants during two tasks -- book-sharing and bead-stringing -- in low-income, ethnically diverse families. Mexican, Dominican, and African American mothers and their infants were video-recorded sharing wordless books and toy beads in the home when infants were aged 1;2 and 2;0. Mothers' utterances…

Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

This study explored preschool age and gender differences in help-seeking within the theoretical framework of scaffolded problem-solving and self-regulation (Bruner, 1986; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978; 1986). Within-subject analyses tracked changes in help-seeking among 62 preschoolers (34 boys, 28 girls, mean age 4.22 years) solving a challenging…

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…