Background: Parental input plays a central role in typical language acquisition and development. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), characterized by social communicative and language difficulties, parental input presents an important avenue for investigation as a target for intervention. A rich body of literature has identified which aspects of…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Purpose: Understanding variability sources in early language interaction is critical to identifying children whose development is at risk and designing interventions. Variability across socioeconomic status (SES) groups has been extensively explored. However, SES is a limited individual clinical indicator. For example, it is not generally directly…

We trained forty German-speaking children aged 1;8-2;0 in their comprehension of UNTER [UNDER]. The target word was presented within semantically organized input in the form of a "narrative" to the experimental group and within "unconnected speech" to the control group. We tested children's learning by asking them to…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the language status of 120 young, Latino dual language learners living in poverty in the United States. Maternal language input and home language and literacy environments were examined with regard to language development at 24 and 36 months. Results suggested that even when combining English and Spanish…

Phonological neighborhood analyses of tow children's expressive lexicons, maternal input, and an adult lexicon were conducted. In addition to raw counts and frequency-weighted counts, neighborhood size was calculated as the proportion of the lexicon to which each target word is similar, to normalize for vocabulary size differences. Analyses…

There has been little research comparing the nature and contributions of language input of mothers and fathers to their young children. This study examined differences in mother and father talk to their 24 month-old children. This study also considered contributions of parent education, child care quality and mother and father language (output,…

To examine language outcomes related to language acquisition and academic readiness, this study followed a group of toddlers with slow expressive language development (SELD) through their kindergarten year. Subjects were 27 children between 20 and 34 months who produced fewer than 50 words or no 2-word combinations on L. Resconla's (1989) Language…

This book provides a summary of past and cutting-edge research on the acquisition of language by young children. It lends support to the behavioralist paradigm of language acquisition, namely, that maternal rewards and corrections should be integrated with perceptual, cognitive, and social learning conceptualizations in a skill-learning approach…