Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from…

This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11-4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese…

In this study, age of onset (AoO) was investigated in five- and six-year-old bilingual Frisian-Dutch children. AoO to Dutch ranged between zero and four and had a positive effect on Dutch receptive vocabulary size, but hardly influenced the children's accurate use of Dutch inflection. The influence of AoO on vocabulary was more prominent than the…

Preschoolers' vocabulary acquisition sets the stage for later reading ability and school achievement. This study examined the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and the quality of the home environment of seventy-seven Chilean majority and Mapuche minority families from low and lower-middle-class backgrounds in explaining individual differences in…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…