Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do…

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in…

Infants from low-socioeconomic status (SES) households hear a projected 30 million fewer words than their higher-SES peers. In a recent study, Hirsh-Pasek et al. (Psychological Science, 2015; 26: 1071) found that in a low-income sample, fluency and connectedness in exchanges between caregivers and toddlers predicted child language a year later…

The current study investigated whether point-accompanying characteristics, like vocalizations and hand shape, differentiate infants' underlying motives of prelinguistic pointing. We elicited imperative (requestive) and declarative (expressive and informative) pointing acts in experimentally controlled situations, and analyzed accompanying…

The growth rate and the composition of expressive lexicon was studied in a sample of 903 infants between the age of 0;8 and 1;4 whose parents completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-Words and Gestures. As expected, older children had on average larger vocabularies compared to younger children.…

Using multi-level growth modeling, we examined the effect of several measures of maternal input on growth in children's word types from 15-54 months. Mothers and children engaged in a picture description task (N = 77) at 15, 24, 33, and 54 months; the frequency of children's observed word types at each wave was coded and additional independent…

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother-infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants' vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother-infant toy play at…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

We trained forty German-speaking children aged 1;8-2;0 in their comprehension of UNTER [UNDER]. The target word was presented within semantically organized input in the form of a "narrative" to the experimental group and within "unconnected speech" to the control group. We tested children's learning by asking them to…

This article describes the development and validation of the Developmental Snapshot, a 52-item parent questionnaire on child language and vocal communication development that can be administered monthly and scored automatically. The Snapshot was created to provide an easily administered monthly progress monitoring tool that enables parents to…

This paper reports the outcome of a multi-sensory intervention on infant language skills. A programme titled "Rhyming Game and Exercise Club", which included kinaesthetic-tactile mother-child rhyming games performed in natural joint attention situations, was intended to accelerate Finnish six- to eight-month-old infants' language development. The…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the language status of 120 young, Latino dual language learners living in poverty in the United States. Maternal language input and home language and literacy environments were examined with regard to language development at 24 and 36 months. Results suggested that even when combining English and Spanish…

This longitudinal assessment concentrated on the relation between the home literacy environment (HLE) and early language acquisition during infancy and toddlerhood. In study 1, after controlling for socio-economic status, a broadly defined HLE predicted language comprehension in 50 infants. In study 2, 27 children returned for further analyses.…

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…