The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

Mind-mindedness (MM), the parent's propensity to treat their young child as an individual with a mind of their own, has repeatedly been found to be positively associated with subsequent child development outcomes. In the current Swedish study, the first aim was to investigate the main features of MM in this cultural context and the second aim was…

From the second year of life, children with typical development (TD) demonstrate the ability to form word-word relations. However, this ability has received little attention in children with Down syndrome (DS). We investigated their ability to establish associative relationships between words that tend to occur in the same context. Two groups of…

In this study, infant vocabulary development was tracked in a multilingual society (Singapore) within a socioeconomically diverse sample. The sample comprised 1316 infants from 17.4 to 27.7 months (669 females, 647 males; 88% Chinese race, 4% Malay, 4% Indian, and 0.004% mixed-race [4% declined to provide race information]). Children varied in…

Purpose: Early motor abilities (gesture, oral motor, and gross/fine skills) are related to language abilities, and this is not due to an association with cognitive or symbolic abilities: Oral motor skills are uniquely associated with language abilities at 21 months of age. It is important to determine whether this motor-language relationship…

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between paternal attitudes, father-child activities, socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors, and the early child productive vocabulary. We also wanted to study if paternal factors affected boys' and girls' language acquisition differently. Our data consisted of 722 fathers and their…

Purpose: The study examined the effects of imageability and phonological neighborhood density on the acquisition of word production in Czech, controlling for part-of-speech class, word length, and word frequency. Phonological neighborhood density is of interest because previous research has not examined highly inflected languages such as Czech.…

Purpose: Wide interindividual variability characterizes language development in the general and at-risk populations of up to 3 years of age. We adopted a complex approach that considers multiple aspects of lexical and grammatical skills to identify language profiles in low-risk preterm and full-term children. We also investigated biological and…

Trajectories of expressive language development are highly heterogeneous in autism. Yoder et al. found that parental responsiveness, child response to joint attention, child communicative intent and consonant inventory were unique predictors of expressive language growth in minimally verbal preschoolers 16 months later (n = 87). This study applied…

The focus of this article is Faroese children's early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8-36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the…

The aim of this study was to analyse the existence of differences in lexical development as a function of day care attendance and maternal education. Data were collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The reports of 2084 toddlers were analysed. The results for toddlers older than 24 months…

Purpose: We report on a replicated single-case design study that measured the feasibility of an expressive vocabulary intervention for three Cantonese-speaking toddlers with small expressive lexicons relative to their age. The aim was to assess the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic feasibility of an intervention method developed for…

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants' and toddlers' communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children's communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The…

Previous research indicates that infant-directed speech (IDS) is usually slower than adult-directed speech (ADS) and mothers prefer placing a focused word in isolation or utterance-final position in (English) IDS, which may benefit word learning. This study investigated the speaking rate and word position of IDS in two typologically-distinct…

Purpose: This review article summarizes a program of longitudinal investigation of twins' language acquisition with a focus on causal pathways for specific language impairment (SLI) and nonspecific language impairment in children at 4 and 6 years with known history at 2 years. Method: The context of the overview is established by legacy scientific…