Background: Language development is critical for children's life chances. Promoting parent-child interactions is suggested as one mechanism to support language development in the early years. However, limited evidence exists for a causal effect of parent-child interactions on children's language development. Methods: Data from the Language in…

Both the amount "and" responsiveness of adult language input contribute to the language development of autistic and non-autistic children. From parent-child interaction footage, we measured the amount of adult language input, overall parent responsiveness, and six discrete parent responsive behaviours ("imitations, expansions,…

It is well established in Australian research and policy literature that children attending schools in regional, rural, and remote locations will benefit from access not only to experiences and interactions offered in their own communities but also to the sorts of experiences available to those in more populated areas of Australia as well. Virtual…

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months…

Researchers agree that early literacy activities, like book sharing and parent-child play, are important for stimulating language development. We hypothesize that book sharing is most powerful because it elicits more interactive talk in young children than other activities. Parents of 43 infants (9-18 months) made two daylong audio recordings…

Following a usage-based approach of language acquisition, the goal of this article is to make a detailed analysis of other and self-repairs targeting a French child's non-conventional productions between 1;09 and 4;0. The study's hypotheses were that (1) the mother would start by offering repairs and later in development use strategies to lead the…

This observational study examined the Iranian mothers' interaction with their typically developing children aged 13-18 months during free play at home (n = 40). The first aim was to determine the main type of Iranian maternal verbal responsiveness. Another aim was to investigate the impact of concurrent prediction of maternal verbal responsiveness…

Purpose: This study was conducted in a large Midwestern metropolitan area to examine the language environments at home and in center-based childcare for young children who are living in poverty. We compared child language use and exposure in the home and childcare settings using extended observations with automated Language Environment Analysis to…

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) need a supportive family environment to facilitate language development. The present study was designed to assess the effects of parent training (PT) on enhancing children's communication development. The PT was based on the "It Takes Two to Talk" model, with specific adaptations for families of…

Purpose: Understanding variability sources in early language interaction is critical to identifying children whose development is at risk and designing interventions. Variability across socioeconomic status (SES) groups has been extensively explored. However, SES is a limited individual clinical indicator. For example, it is not generally directly…

This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different…

Background: In recent years many studies have shown that the use of cochlear implants (CIs) improves children's skills in processing the auditory signal and, consequently, the development of both language comprehension and production. Nevertheless, many authors have also reported that the development of language skills in children with CIs is…

Gestures and vocal elements interact from the early stages of language development, but the role of this interaction in the language learning process is not yet completely understood. The aim of this study is to explore gestural accompaniment's influence on the acoustic properties of vocalizations in the transition to first words. Eleven Spanish…

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however,…

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we…