We investigated how educators, mothers and children used temporal language in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants initially included 40 educator-younger child dyads (27-36 months) and 45 educator-older child dyads (48-60 months) from early childhood centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were asked to nominate and discuss four…

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…

This study explores the cognitive development of children born to adolescent mothers within South Africa compared to existing reference data, and explores development by child age bands to examine relative levels of development. Cross-sectional analyses present data from 954 adolescents (10-19 years) and their first-born children (0-68 months).…

This study aims to examine the effect of kangaroo care on Vulnerable Infant Syndrome (VIS) in the mother. The sample group consisted of 58 preterm infants, 27 of whom were control and 31 were experimental groups. Data were collected using the question form, the Vulnerable Baby Scale (VBS), the Edinburgh Post Partum Depression Scale (EPDS), the…

Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

This study was carried out to compare the socialization levels of secondary school students in terms of some variables. Data were obtained from secondary school students (n=565) studying in a province in western Turkey. "Socialization Scale" and "Socialization in Sports Scale" developed by Sahan (2007) were used as data…

Children with autism often display discrepancies in their intellectual functioning, with nonverbal skills frequently being more developed than verbal. Compared to monolingual autistic children, however, much less is known about how bilingualism affects intelligence in autism. The current study examined the intelligence profiles of 146 bilingual…

This study explores typically developing bilingual children's performance in their English as a heritage language. The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of heritage language expectations and the role of chronological age and bilingual exposure. A broad range of receptive and expressive linguistic domains are investigated as a…

Late language emergence (LLE) may result from genetic and environmental factors. Little is known about environmental factors in LLE in South Africa. The study describes the nature of differences in language functioning between toddlers with LLE and without LLE, and which factors were associated with LLE in a middle-income area in South Africa.…

Purpose: Children who are hard of hearing (CHH) tend to have reduced vocabularies compared to children with normal hearing (CNH). Prior research on vocabulary skills in children with hearing loss has focused primarily on their breadth of knowledge (how many words are known). Depth of vocabulary knowledge (how well words are known) is not well…

Mother-infant interactions are a proximal process in early development and may be especially salient for children who are at risk for social difficulties (i.e. infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder). To inform how indices of maternal behaviors may improve parent-mediated interventions designed to mitigate autism spectrum…

Research findings: No research to date has compared mental state language (MSL) in conversations between children and different adult talk partners, such as mothers and educators. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of MSL (verbalization of mental states such as remembering, knowing and thinking) by children, educators, and mothers…

Previous research suggests that increased second language (L2) input at home may not support L2 acquisition in children from migrant backgrounds. In drawing this conclusion, existing work has largely aggregated across family members. This study contrasts the effect of L2 input from older siblings with that from mothers. Participants were 113 child…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare masked English speech recognition thresholds between Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children and to evaluate effects of age, maternal education, and English receptive language abilities on individual differences in masked speech recognition. Method: Forty-three Spanish-English…