This paper is a quantitative synthesis of research on home literacy environment (HLE) and children's English as a second language (ESL) learning outcomes through a meta-analysis of 18 articles in kindergarten, primary, and secondary school students (N = 4401) carried out between 2000 and 2018. It examines the associations between HLE factors and…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

The present study analyses 3- to 6-year-old children's dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults' linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard…

Research has indicated differences in prosodic expression for infants-at-risk-of-autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and it has been proposed that caregiver speech to these infants may also be moderated prosodically. In typical development, the pitch range of maternal infant-directed speech (IDS) narrows and utterance intensity decreases with infant…

Examination of infant vocalization patterns across interactive and noninteractive contexts may facilitate better understanding of early communication development. In the current study, with 24 infant-parent dyads, infant volubility increased significantly when parent interaction ceased (presenting a "still face," or SF) after a period of…

Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children's linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers' speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The…

Young infants can learn statistical regularities and patterns in sequences of events. Studies have demonstrated a relationship between early sequence learning skills and later development of cognitive and language skills. We investigated the relation between infants' visual response speed to novel event sequences, and their later receptive and…

The present study examined continuity/discontinuity and stability/instability of noun and verb production measures in 30 child-mother dyads observed at 16 and 20 months, and predictive relations with the acquisition of nouns and verbs at 24 months. Children exhibited significant discontinuity and robust stability in the frequency of nouns and…

F[subscript 0]-based acoustic measures were extracted from a brief, sentence-final target word spoken during structured play interactions between mothers and their 3- to 14-month-old infants and were analyzed based on demographic variables and DSM-IV Axis-I clinical diagnoses and their common modifiers. F[subscript 0] range (?F[subscript 0]) was…

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at the…