How does parental causal input relate to children's later comprehension of causal verbs? Causal constructions in verbs differ across languages. Turkish has both lexical and morphological causatives. We asked whether (1) parental causal language input varied for different types of play (guided vs. free play), (2) early parental causal language…

Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from…

Aims: Although IDS is typically described as slower than adult-directed speech (ADS), potential impacts of slower speech on language development have not been examined. We explored whether IDS speech rates in 42 mother-infant dyads at four time periods predicted children's language outcomes at two years. Method: We correlated IDS speech rate with…

Previous research has shown that the quality of mother-child interactions between pre-term children and their mothers tends to be poorer than that of full-term children and their mothers (Forcada-Guex, Pierrehumbert, Borghini, Moessinger & Muller-Nix, 2006). Mothers of pre-term children are less responsive and more intrusive in interactions…

Both walking abilities and pointing gestures in infants are associated with later language skills. Within this longitudinal study we investigate the relationship between walk onset and first observed index-finger points and their respectively predictive value for later language skills. We assume that pointing as a motor as well as a communicative…

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in…

This study investigated the associations between maternal depression when infants were 3 to 11 months old (M = 6 months), and positive parenting behaviors when children were between 12 and 22 months (M = 17 months) and the home language environment assessed when children were 18 to 28 months old (M = 23.5 months) in a sample of 29 low-income…

The goals of this study were to analyze the growth and stability of vocabulary, mean length of the three longest utterances (MLLUw), and sentence complexity in European Portuguese-speaking children aged 1;4-2;6, to explore differences in growth as a function of personal and family-related variables, and to investigate the inter-relationships among…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

Results of a statistical study of language in 30 infants suggest that two acquisition styles (nominal/pronominal and referential/expressive) are developing in parallel. Only for children heavily emphasizing one strategy can a distinctive style be determined. Results at 20 months were only partially predictive of performance at 28 months. (MSE)

We investigated infant precursors of low language scores in early childhood. The sample included 373 probands in 130 monozygotic (MZ) and 109 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs in which at least one member of the pair scored in the lowest 15th percentile of a control sample on a general language factor derived from tester-administered tests at…