Background: In typically developing (TD) children, gesture emerges around 9 months of age, allowing children to communicate prior to speech. Due to the important role gesture plays in the early communication of autistic and TD children, various tasks have been used to assess gesture ability. However, few data exist on whether and how tasks…

Introduction: Children's early language and communication skills are efficiently measured using parent report, for example, communicative development inventories (CDIs). These have scalable potential to determine risk of later language delay, and associations between delay and risk factors such as prematurity and poverty. However, there may be…

Children's early vocabulary shows sex differences -- with boys having smaller vocabularies than age-comparable girls -- a pattern that becomes evident in both singletons and twins. Twins also use fewer words than their singleton peers. However, we know relatively less about sex differences in early gesturing in singletons or twins, and also how…

New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed…

Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

Background: Early in development, caregivers' object labelling contributes to children's word learning. Language development is a bi-directional process, and differences in joint engagement (JE) and language among children with developmental disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may provide caregivers varying contexts and…

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine…

Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct…

This study investigated verbal imitation from a multimodal point of view, considering the mutual influence of children's and adults' participation. Sixteen Spanish-speaking children were observed longitudinally at 21, 24, and 30 months of age in natural settings. We analyzed the multimodal characteristics of children's and adults' repetitions,…

A majority of children's language learning experiences occur in inclusive early child care and education settings. Few evidence-based professional development (PD) programs exist to empower early childhood education providers to use language instruction practices with children in inclusive classrooms. There is little research on providers'…

Preliminary findings from a follow-up study of 33 children, assessed for their socioemotional development from 18 months of age, are presented. At 77 months, they were evaluated again in a laboratory context, recording on video a situation of discussion of a conflict with the caregiver and then coding these videos using the CIB instrument.…

Lexical iconicity--signs or words that resemble their meaning--is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be…

In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…

Gesture plays an important role in early language development, as how parents respond to their children's gestures may help to facilitate language acquisition. Less is known about whether parental responses facilitate language learning later in childhood and whether responses vary depending on children's language ability. This study explored…

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…