This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to…

Purpose: Fathers play a critical but underresearched role in their children's cognitive and linguistic development. Focusing on two-parent families with a mother and a father, the present longitudinal study explores the amount of paternal input infants hear during the first 2 years of life, how this input changes over time, and how it relates to…

The maternal language input literature suggests that mothers with more education use a greater quantity and complexity of language with their young children compared to mothers with less education although race and socioeconomic status have been confounded in most studies because of small sample sizes. The current Family Life study included a…

Despite rapidly growing research on parental influences on children's executive function (EF), the uniqueness and specificity of parental predictors and links between adult EF and parenting remain unexamined. This 13-month longitudinal study of 117 parent-child dyads (60 boys; M[subscript age] at Time 1 = 3.94 years, SD = 0.53) included detailed…

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…

Background: An association between social disadvantage and early language development is commonly reported in the literature, but less attention has been paid to the way that different aspects of social disadvantage affect both expressive and receptive language in the first 2 years of life. Aims: To examine the contributions of gender, parental…

Background: Mother-child mental state talk (MST) supports children's developing social-emotional understanding. In typically developing (TD) children, family conversations about emotion, cognition, and causes have been linked to children's emotion understanding. Specific language impairment (SLI) may compromise developing emotion understanding and…

Research evidence suggests children experiencing adversity are at risk of language disparities in early childhood. This puts these children at risk of poor language outcomes, perpetuating disadvantage in later development and academic life. This study aimed to investigate associations between Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) attendance,…

This study examined the development of and possible predictors of interrogative forms and functions in early childhood Mandarin. All the interrogatives drawn from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) were analyzed. The main results indicated that (i) there were significant age effects in interrogative forms and…

Researchers have consistently found a link between the quality of early parent-child book-reading interactions and children's language skill. Two aspects of quality (level of abstraction and utterance function) were examined simultaneously in the current study to further refine our understanding of how parents' talk during shared reading predicts…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

Current research on children's autistic traits in the general population relies predominantly on caregiver-report, yet the extent to which individual, caregiver or demographic characteristics are associated with informants' ratings has not been sufficiently explored. In this study, caregivers of 396 Singaporean two-year-olds from a birth cohort…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

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…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (short form) was adapted for Samoan and Tongan speakers in New Zealand. The adaptation process drew upon language samples from Samoan and Tongan parent-child dyads with 20- and 26-month-old children and adult informants. The resulting 100-word language inventories in Samoan and Tongan, plus a…