Purpose: Gesture delay in autistic infants and toddlers has been widely reported. The developmental trajectory of gesture production during early childhood is understudied. Thus, little is known about the possible changes of gesture production over time. The present study aimed to document the development of gesture production in autistic children…

Background: Evidence shows that the relation with the referent (object manipulation, contact/no contact pointing) and the different hand features (index finger/open palm) when pointing indicate different levels of cognitive and linguistic attainment in typical development (TD). This evidences the close link between pointing, cognition and language…

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Purpose: This study followed up children identified with expressive language delay (ELD) or receptive/expressive language delay (R/ELD) at 2 years of age, Time 1 (T1), in order to identify their language profiles at 4--5 years, Time 2 (T2), and explore relationships to T1 language, gesture use, and symbolic comprehension. Method: Nineteen of 22…

When children are confronted with an emotional problem, affective flexibility mobilizes their cognitive and emotional resources to optimally address it. We investigated the contribution of executive functions to cognitive and affective flexibility in preschoolers. We assessed affective flexibility in 67 preschoolers (30 girls; M[subscript months]…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

Instructor listening skill is an understudied area in instructional communication research. This study looks at teachers' active empathic listening behavior association with student incivility. Scholars recognize student incivility as a growing problem and have called for research that identifies classroom behaviors that can affect classroom…

Previous studies have shown that older children gesture more while telling a story than younger children. This increase in gesture use has been attributed to increased story complexity. In adults, both narrative complexity and imagery predict gesture frequency. In this study, we tested the strength of three predictors of children's gesture use in…

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…

Speakers of all ages spontaneously gesture as they talk. These gestures predict children's milestones in vocabulary and sentence structure. We ask whether gesture serves a similar role in the development of narrative skill. Children were asked to retell a story conveyed in a wordless cartoon at age five and then again at six, seven, and eight.…

This study examined infants' early visual attention (at 1 month of age) and social engagement (4 months) as predictors of their later joint attention (12 and 18 months). The sample (n = 325), drawn from the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a longitudinal multicenter project conducted at 4 centers of the National Institute of Child Health and Human…

Recent studies indicate the need to investigate the sources of toddlers' understanding of another person's pretense. The present study is a cultural and longitudinal extension of the work of Lillard and Witherington (2004), who claimed that mothers modify their behaviors during pretense and that the some of these behavior modifications help their…

Purpose: This study aimed to identify child-level characteristics that predict gains in language skills for children with language impairment who were receiving therapy within the public schools. The therapy provided represented business-as-usual speech/language treatment provided by speech-language pathologists in the public schools. Method: The…

Using an epidemiological sample (N = 1,117) and a prospective longitudinal design, this study tested the direct and indirect effects of preverbal and verbal communication (15 months to 3 years) on executive function (EF) at age 4 years. Results indicated that whereas gestures (15 months), as well as language (2 and 3 years), were correlated with…