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…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development…

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…

This study examined an insufficiently studied predictor of functional language, social motivation, in a group of 87 young children with autism spectrum disorder. Participants (age 14-31 months at the start of the study) were assessed at four times over 24 months. We tested total and indirect associations between early social motivation and later…

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…

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental…

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…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

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…