The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…

Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children's daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n =…

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

Following a usage-based approach of language acquisition, the goal of this article is to make a detailed analysis of other and self-repairs targeting a French child's non-conventional productions between 1;09 and 4;0. The study's hypotheses were that (1) the mother would start by offering repairs and later in development use strategies to lead the…

Mothers' provision of utterances with internal state words has been shown to influence infants' acquisition of internal state vocabulary and has been proposed to foster preschoolers' theory of mind development. In this article the authors examine maternal internal state speech during free play with infants at 13, 17, and 21 months. The study…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, "-paq", that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The…

To investigate possible influences on and consequences of mothers' speech, specific infant behaviors preceding and following four pragmatic categories of mothers' utterances--responsive utterances, supportive behavioral directives, intrusive behavioral directives, and intrusive attentional directives--were examined longitudinally during dyadic…