What are the vocal experiences of children growing up on Malakula island, Vanuatu, where multilingualism is the norm? Long-form audio-recordings captured spontaneous speech behavior by, and around, 38 children (5-33 months, 23 girls) from 11 villages. Automated analyses revealed most children's vocal input came from female adults and other…

Background: Early language input contributes to children's healthy brain development and sets the stage for life-long achievement and wellness. Parents vary in their ability to offer rich language support within the home environment due to social and contextual factors. There is a lack of research on the effectiveness of a universal prevention…

A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children's comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of…

Both touch and speech independently have been shown to play an important role in infant development. However, little is known about how they may be combined in the input to the child. We examined the use of touch and speech together by having mothers read their 5-month-olds books about body parts and animals. Results suggest that speech+touch…

Generics ("'Dogs' bark") convey important information about categories and facilitate children's learning. Two studies with parents and their 2- or 4-year-old children (N = 104 dyads) examined whether individual differences in generic language use are as follows: (a) stable over time, contexts, and domains, and (b) linked…

When speaking to young children, adults adapt their language to that of the child. In this article, we suggest that this child-directed speech (CDS) is the result of a transactional process of dynamic adaptation between the child and the adult. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children to those of the CDS of their caregivers.…

In recent years, the intersection of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience with regard to deaf individuals has received increasing attention from a variety of academic and educational audiences. Both research and pedagogy have addressed questions about whether deaf children learn in the same ways that hearing children…

This study examines the multiplicity of literacies while incorporating multiple modes of meaning to understand a young trilingual child's meaning-making processes. This qualitative study reports the results of a combination of ethnographic observations and a longitudinal case study of one child's multi-literacy development from birth to…

The following manuscript is a review of research surrounding best practices for language and literacy development in children birth to age three. Part 1 of the review begins with the research on language acquisition beginning in utero, continuing through infancy and onto the emergence of speech. The review discusses the importance of language…

Choosing a method of communication for a child with hearing loss is a complex process that must occur early to prevent developmental consequences. Research shows that parents' decisions are influenced by professionals; parental attitudes and knowledge also may be influential. The present study investigated additional influences on parents'…

Individual differences in parental reminiscing style are hypothesized to have long-lasting effects on children's autobiographical memory development, including the age of their earliest memories. This study represents the first prospective test of this hypothesis. Conversations about past events between 17 mother-child dyads were recorded on…

We report on a study investigating 3-5-year-old children's use of gesture to resolve lexical ambiguity. Children were told three short stories that contained two homonym senses; for example, "bat" (flying mammal) and "bat" (sports equipment). They were then asked to re-tell these stories to a second experimenter. The data were coded for the means…

The early noncry vocalizations of infants are salient social signals. Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30%-50% of these sounds, and their responsiveness to infants' prelinguistic noncry vocalizations facilitates the development of phonology and speech. Have infants learned that their vocalizations influence the behavior of social partners? If…

Persistence is important in developing pre-school children's ego control. Based on the fact that during the teaching process a teacher's communication and actions will have a significant influence on young children, which is due to the teachers' high degree of control over them, four experiments were designed to probe the influences of teachers'…

Between March 2009 and March 2011, Talk To Your Baby has been engaged in a research project, under the title of Face to Face, to identify key messages for parents and carers in relation to communicating with babies and young children, and has examined the most effective ways to promote these messages to parents and carers. The Face to Face project…