The present study explored preschoolers' internal state language and resolution strategies in sad stories that shifted to a positive emotional tone. Fifty-four 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds attending a laboratory preschool shared stories about 'a time when you were happy/sad.' Stories were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for internal state…

This study explored associations between mothers' language teaching practices and children's language skills concurrently and longitudinally, while also taking into account the children's sex and mothers' education. Estonian mothers of 76 children reported their language teaching practices at child ages 3;0 and 4;0. Children's language…

Almost five million children attend preschool in the United States each year. Recent attention has been paid to the ways in which preschool classrooms shape children's early language development. This article discusses the importance of peers and classroom composition through the lens of age and socioeconomic status and the implications for…

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…

We examined differences between children with autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children over an 8-month period in: (a) longitudinal associations between expressive and receptive vocabulary and (b) the extent to which caregiver utterances provided within an "optimal" engagement state mediated the pathway from early…

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…

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.…

The primary purpose of this study was to compare language and narrative skills of both talented and regular young children in Taiwan. The participants were asked to tell a story based on images in children's picture books. Twelve children, who participated in a screening session designed to identify young talented children for the Enrichment…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the dimensionality of language ability for young children (4-8 years) from prekindergarten to third grade (n = 915), theorizing that measures of vocabulary and grammar ability will represent a unitary trait across these ages, and to determine whether discourse skills represent an additional…

Research Findings: This study investigated the long-term interrelations among children's language competencies, their home literacy environment (HLE), and 3 aspects of socioemotional development from ages 3 to 8, controlling for characteristics of the child and family. For this sample of 547 typically developing German children, parents and…

Researchers have suggested that as children's language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to compare vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking in large samples of Korean and U.S. children ages 18-35 months. Method: Data for 2,191 Korean children (211 children recruited "offline" through preschools, and 1,980 recruited "online" via the Internet) and 274 U.S.…

Early language development sets the stage for a lifetime of competence in language and literacy. However, the neural mechanisms associated with the relative advantages of early communication success, or the disadvantages of having delayed language development, are not well explored. In this study, 174 elementary school-age children whose parents…

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1 ; 6 () or 1 ; 3, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 9 () and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CDI, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Words &…

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)