The number of U.S. children living in households with extended families has greatly increased in the last 4 decades. This demographic shift calls for a reevaluation of the impact of household size on children's development. Household density (HHD), measured as the ratio of people to bedrooms in a home, has been shown to negatively relate to…

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) conducted a landscape evaluation of early childhood programs in Indiana (IN) between the spring of 2021 and the summer of 2022. Commissioned by Early Learning Indiana (ELI), this study provides Indiana programs and policymakers with research-based information on the quality of a sample of…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

Background: Drawing on the family stress model (Conger and Donnellan in Ann Rev Psychol 58:175-199, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085551), parenting programs typically support caregivers' nurturing and cognitively stimulating practices to mitigate the effects of poverty on child development, with small-to-moderate…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

Individuals with sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) have an increased risk of language delays and impairments. However, there are only a few data relative to their language development in early childhood. The present study aimed to investigate the preverbal skills shown by a group of 8-month-old children with SCTs to assess the presence of a possible…

During early childhood, economically disadvantaged children can experience challenges that affect their social-emotional, language, and physical health development across the lifespan. Psychologists have tested several interventions to address developmental problems during early childhood, but information about the degree to which economically…

This study examined the effectiveness of the "Thrive by Three" intervention for 1- to 3-year-old's language development. Data from 78 childcare centres, 187 toddler classrooms, and 1561 children (91.4% native Norwegian) were included. Results revealed that children in the intervention group had slightly steeper language development than…

Parents with fewer educational and economic resources (low socioeconomic-status, SES) tend to speak less to their children, with consequences for children's later life outcomes. Despite this well-established and highly popularized link, less research addresses why the SES "word gap" exists. Moreover, while research has assessed…

Real-time attention coordination in parent-toddler dyads is often studied in tightly controlled laboratory settings. These studies have demonstrated the importance of joint attention in scaffolding the development of attention and the types of dyadic behaviors that support early language learning. Little is known about how often these behaviors…

This study investigates the relationship between early maternal employment history and children's vocabulary and inductive reasoning ability at age 5, drawing on longitudinal information on 2,200 children from the Growing Up in Scotland data. Prior research rarely addresses dynamics in maternal employment and the methodological ramifications of…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of…

This research takes a dyadic approach to study early word learning and focuses on toddlers' (N = 20, age: 17-23 months) "information seeking" and parents' "information providing" behaviors and the ways the two are coupled in real-time parent-child interactions. Using head-mounted eye tracking, this study provides the first…

Parental education and child gender are related to learning and development during childhood and adolescence. The present study investigated the role of mother's education level and child gender for children's vocabulary and math skills in Norway. Children's vocabulary and math skills were assessed in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)…