Parents modulate their speech and their actions during infant-directed interactions, and these modulations facilitate infants' language and action learning, respectively. But do these behaviors and their benefits cross these modality boundaries? We investigated mothers' infant-directed speech and actions while they demonstrated the action-effects…

Children use language structures as a basis for learning how to read. Therefore, literacy learning for young children must incorporate the child's personal use of oral language. It is their personal oral language that supports them as they attempt new concepts and become better readers. Because of the important role that oral language plays in a…

Background: The use of mobile health (mHealth) technology is rapidly expanding in healthcare worldwide. mHealth tools may provide parents with access to resources essential for promoting language development. Aim: The current study aimed to determine how an mHealth parental resource influenced 42 preschool children's (4.0-5.11 months old) language…

Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e., harmony, reciprocity and responsiveness in interactions) is a component of parent-child interactions that is not well characterized in studies of play. We tested whether…

The paper describes the transformational role technology plays in the management and transmission of heritage (minority) languages (HL) in two UK-based multilingual families. Data were collected in the form of a language background survey, parental interviews, and recordings of interactional events within the home. Findings suggest that parents…

Media use could be detrimental to children's language and literacy skills because it may displace other language-enhancing activities like shared reading and caregiver-child interactions. Furthermore, the extent to which children use media with adults (joint media engagement), the extent to which they use interactive media (apps/games), and the…

The early language environments of low-income Hispanic children can be negatively affected when their Spanish-speaking caregivers face racism, assimilation pressure, and/or misinformed advice based on English-only ideologies. This article reports on the design and efficacy of Háblame Bebé, a language-promoting phone application that encourages…

Digital media and electronic toys are changing the landscape of childhood. How does this change impact language learning? In this chapter, we explore potential alignment between six established principles of language and children's engagement with digital media and electronic toys. We argue that electronic toys and digital media are not solely…

The main goal of this article is to study the respective role of language typology and context on the noun to verb asymmetry in caregiver speech. The speech of 20 French- and 20 Turkish-speaking mothers addressed to their children in two different situations (book-reading and toy-play) were analysed in terms of noun to verb ratio as well as in…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

A distributional analysis of parent-child conversational interactions for three large longitudinal corpora is reported. First, the potential role of conversational interaction in language learning is examined, and it is argued that certain sources of conversational input provide children with excellent opportunities to advance their linguistic…