Purpose: To investigate the language environments experienced by preterm-born infants, this study compared the linguistic and interactive features of parent--infant conversations involving 2-year-old preterm- and term-born infants. The study also explored how mother-infant and father-infant conversations may be differentially affected by…

Purpose: The aim of the present study is to characterize the maturational changes during the first 6 months of life in the neural encoding of two speech sound features relevant for early language acquisition: the stimulus fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]), related to stimulus pitch, and the vowel formant composition, particularly F[subscript…

Purpose: Developmental functional modules (DFMs) are biological modules that are defined by their structural (morphological), functional, or developmental elements, and, in some cases, all three of these. This review article considers the hypothesis that vocal development in the first year of life can be understood in large part with respect to…

Purpose: Limited quantitative data exist regarding growth of the velopharynx within the first 2 years of life. The purpose of this study was to (a) quantify changes in velopharyngeal structures due to growth during the first 2 years of life, (b) examine the impact of sex and race within this age range, and (c) provide normative measures for…

Purpose: This study evaluates the extent to which automated indices of vocal development are stable and valid for predicting language in infants at increased familial likelihood for autism and/or language impairment and relatively lower likelihood infants. Method: A group of infants with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism; 20 infants) and a comparison…

Purpose: Parent report was compared to judgments made by a trained researcher to determine the utility of the Vocal Development Landmarks Interview (VDLI) for monitoring development of vocal behaviors in very young children. Method: Parents of 40 typically developing children, ages 6-21 months, provided full-day naturalistic audio recordings of…

Purpose: Instances of laryngeal constriction have been noted as a feature of infant vocal development. The purpose of this study was to directly evaluate the developmental occurrence of laryngeal constriction phenomena in infant crying, cooing, and babbling vocalizations. Method: The cry and noncry vocalizations of 20 healthy term-born infants…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to determine if there is a specific association between motor delays and receptive and expressive language function, respectively, in prematurely born children. Method: Retrospective data review: 126 premature children = 1,250-g birthweight from English-speaking families were evaluated on motor development…

Purpose: Tracking of infants' progression through early vocal stages supports the identification of children at risk for language delays and guides early intervention for children with disabilities. However, few clinical tools are available to support systematic assessment of infants' early vocal development. This study sought to develop and…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to analyze verbal and nonverbal maternal response types following infant vocalizations in younger (ages 4-8 months) versus older (ages 10-14 months) infant groups and their potential implications for infant vocal development or word learning. Method: Maternal response types that occurred within 3 s of infant…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of the grunt vocalizations to cognitive and expressive language status in children with disabilities. Children with typical development produce communicative grunts at the onset of referential word production and comprehension at 14-16 months of age and continue to use this…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to study the normal longitudinal development of wideband absorbance and admittance measures through infancy. Method: Two hundred one infants who passed the newborn hearing screen (automated auditory brainstem response) were tested at birth and then followed up at approximately 6, 12, and 18 months of age. Most…

Purpose: This study tested proposals that maternal verbal responses shape infant vocal development, proposals based in part on evidence that infants modified their vocalizations to match mothers' experimentally manipulated vowel or consonant-vowel responses to most (i.e., 70%-80%) infant vocalizations. We tested the proposal in ordinary rather…

Purpose: One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to improve standardized language assessments among bilingual toddlers by investigating and removing the effects of bias due to unfamiliarity with cultural norms or a distributed language system. Method: The Expressive and Receptive Bayley-III language scales were adapted for use in a multilingual country…