Purpose: This study evaluates the impact of temporal synchrony between maternal touch and speech on children's early language development. It investigates whether the proportion of word-touch co-occurrence, overlap, and alignment precision in maternal input influences language acquisition, hypothesizing that such synchrony boosts infants'…

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…

Maternal input influences language development in children with Down syndrome (DS) and typical development (TD). Telegraphic input, or simplified input violating English grammatical rules, is controversial in speech-language pathology, yet no research to date has investigated whether mothers of children with DS use telegraphic input. This study…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the name writing skills, print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter knowledge skills of preschool Turkish children of different socioeconomic levels concerning various variables. This study also analyzes the predictiveness of name writing in supporting early literacy skills of children. The study…

Purpose: The current study was designed to investigate the differences in language input related to family factors (maternal level of education [MLE] and socioeconomic level of deprivation [SLD]) and their association with language outcomes in preschoolers. Method: This study used New Zealand SLD and MLE classification systems to examine…

The robust relation between maternal education and child language that is observed in monolingual populations has not been reliably replicated among bilingual children from immigrant families in the United States. We hypothesized that a variable that operates in immigrant populations--the language in which mothers achieved their highest level of…

Infants' pointing is associated with concurrent and later language development. The communicative intention behind the point -- i.e., imperative versus declarative -- can affect both the nature and strength of these associations, and is therefore a critical factor to consider. Parents' pointing is associated with both infant pointing and infant…

Contemporary parent-implemented early intervention programs for children with autism spectrum disorder usually incorporate a range of techniques with different theoretical underpinnings. While research suggests that parents often learn to implement interventions with an acceptable degree of overall fidelity, there is limited research into parent…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24-32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop…

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.…

The predictive ability of early consonant inventory and intentional communication on later expressive language was examined in 36 boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS). Autism symptom severity was included as a potential moderator. Participants were visited in their homes twice over a 6-year period, and mother-child interactions were videotaped,…

Research regarding specific strategies adolescent mothers (AMs) may utilize to facilitate early language and emergent literacy skills in their children is lacking. This exploratory study investigated AMs' perceived use of preselected common language and emergent literacy strategies and correlated their use of these strategies to their children's…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…

The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…