The development of language skills is critical to the academic success and overall well-being of children. Research shows that late talking, defined as delayed expressive language development in toddlers, negatively impacts future language and literacy skills. The early identification of children at risk of late talking can significantly improve…

Children's acquisition of directional verbs in sign languages has received a lot of attention, but less is known about the sociocultural process of using these verbs, especially in the context of emerging sign languages in diverse language ecologies. Directional verbs are a common grammatical phenomenon of many sign languages in which some verbs…

This article examines the input to Argentinian Spanish-learning children from low and middle socioeconomic status (SES). It aims to determine whether the vocabulary composition (nouns and verbs) of their input varies as a function of SES, the addressee and other contextual variables such as the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

This study examined play interactions of 15 to 48-month-old children (n = 59) and their caregivers in Lazuri, a UNESCO-rated endangered South-Caucasian ancestral language, and Turkish, a dominant language supplanting Lazuri usage in the community. Child-caregiver dyads played with two toy sets (animal farm and tea set) that provided different…

New approaches to examining the language environment are putting greater emphasis on the use of highly naturalistic audio recordings and questions about cross-cultural differences in children's real-world language experiences. These new approaches and questions require careful examination of different kinds of variables that may influence…

The objective of this study was to investigate changes in the natural language environments of families with typically-developing infants receiving language feedback in South Korea. Volunteer parents of 99 children aged 4-16 months were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. During 6 months' intervention, the experimental group…

Children develop linguistic competencies during interactions with more knowledgeable others. Consequently, one way to support this development is by enhancing the home literacy environment (HLE) in which children live. In this study a non-intensive intervention procedure was developed to improve HLE and linguistic competencies of 125 German…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

This article investigates the contribution of maternal mediation in storybook reading, socioeconomic status (SES), and home literacy environment (HLE) to children's literacy level in kindergarten and first grade in Israeli Arabic-speaking families. A total of 109 kindergarten children and their mothers participated. Children's literacy level was…