Purpose: This study evaluates the extent to which automated indices of vocal development are stable and valid for predicting language in infants at increased familial likelihood for autism and/or language impairment and relatively lower likelihood infants. Method: A group of infants with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism; 20 infants) and a comparison…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

Autism is often associated with early developmental delays in language and motor skills. However, little is known about the complex dynamic processes that drive the co-development of such early difficulties. The aim of the present study was to model the parallel growth of language and motor skills in a cohort of infants and to explore differences…

The development of copying behaviours of a group of infants from 9 to 15 months of age is analysed. These behaviours are classified according to their type (mimetic or imitated) and function (instrumental, social or hybrid). The function of the behaviours is derived from observable indicators linked to dyadic interaction. Mimetic behaviours are…

This study aimed to explore whether early developmental abilities are related to future executive function (EF) in children with motor delays. Fourteen children with motor delays (Mean age = 10.76, SD = 2.55) were included from a larger study. Object interaction and developmental outcomes (Bayley-III) were evaluated at baseline and 3, 6, and 12…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations among children's symbolic functioning at 15 months, joint attention at 24 months, expressive communication at 24 and 36 months, and executive functioning at 36 months. With the sample from rural areas in the United States collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,008), a longitudinal data…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Associative word learning, i.e., associating a word with an object, is an important building block of early word learning for TD infants. This study investigated the development of word-I object associations by TD infants and infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder associated with delayed language and cognitive…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of the grunt vocalizations to cognitive and expressive language status in children with disabilities. Children with typical development produce communicative grunts at the onset of referential word production and comprehension at 14-16 months of age and continue to use this…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

Maternal depression and anxiety are potential risk factors to children's language environments and development. Though existing work has examined relations between these constructs, further work is needed accounting for both depression and anxiety and using more direct measures of the home language environment and children's language development.…

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to determine if there is a specific association between motor delays and receptive and expressive language function, respectively, in prematurely born children. Method: Retrospective data review: 126 premature children = 1,250-g birthweight from English-speaking families were evaluated on motor development…

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…