Research suggests foster children are at risk for poor language skills. One intervention, attachment and biobehavioral catch-up (ABC), was shown to successfully improve not only young foster children's attachment to their parents, but also their receptive vocabulary skills (Bernard et al., 2017; Raby et al., 2019). Given that language acquisition…

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…

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…

Previous research has shown that home environment plays an important role in children's early language skills. Yet, few researchers have examined the unique role of family-level factors (socioeconomic status [SES], household chaos) on children's learning or focused on the longitudinal processes that might explain their relations to children's…

Parental engagement in home-based learning activities is linked to children's academic skills. Yet, interventions that try to enhance parental engagement--sometimes targeted to families with low levels of education--have small effects. This study aimed to inform supports for families by examining how different types of home-based learning…

The present investigation explored the question of whether walking onset is related to infant language development. Study 1 used a longitudinal design (N = 44) to assess infant locomotor and language development every 2 weeks from 10 to 13.5 months of age. The acquisition of walking was associated with a significant increase in both receptive and…

This longitudinal study examined developmental links between closeness in teacher-child relationships and children's receptive language ability from the end of the preschool years into the early elementary years, while controlling for changes in peer interaction quality and child behavioral functioning. The sample included children and their…

Data from a nationally representative sample from Turkey (N = 1,017) were used to investigate the environmental factors that support the receptive vocabulary of 3-year-old children who differ in their developmental risk due to family low economic status and elevated maternal depressive symptoms. Children's vocabulary knowledge was strongly…

The development of imitation during the second year of life plays an important role in domains of sociocognitive development such as language and social learning. Deficits in imitation ability in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from toddlerhood into adulthood have also been repeatedly documented, raising the possibility that early…

The authors examined the associations between socioeconomic status (SES), race, maternal sensitivity, and maternal negative-intrusive behaviors and language development in a sample selected to reduce the typical confound between race and SES (n = 146). Mother-child interactions were observed at 12 and 24 months (coded by randomly assigned African…

Three studies investigated 3-year-olds' comprehension of indirectly and directly learned words after a 2-day delay. Found indirectly and directly learned proper and common names resulted in proper name mappings that picked out individual and common name mappings that could be extended to another category member. When additional, sometimes…