Joint attention and imitation are thought to facilitate a developmental cascade of language and social communication skills. Delays in developing these skills may affect the quality of children's social interactions and subsequent language development. We examined how responding to joint attention and object imitation skills predicted rate of…

Young children from low-SES backgrounds are at higher risk for delayed language development, likely due to differences in their home language environment and decreased opportunities for back and forth communicative exchange. Intervention strategies that encourage reciprocal caregiver-child interactions may effectively promote young children's…

Background: Language exposure is known to be a key factor influencing bilingual vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. There is, however, a lack of knowledge in terms of exposure effects in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and, especially, in interaction with age of onset (AoO) of second language…

Language is vital for social interaction, leading some to suggest early linguistic ability paves the way for good adolescent mental health. The relation between age-5 vocabulary and adolescent internalizing symptoms was examined in two U.K. birth cohorts that are nationally representative in terms of sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status: the…

As an initial step of a larger grant-funded project, this pilot study examined how providing preschool teachers in low socio-economic urban areas with a traditional professional development workshop and subsequent coaching on dialogic reading (DR) strategies affected their storybook reading. Effects on children's receptive and expressive language…

We explored whether supported (SJE) or coordinated joint engagement (CJE) between mothers recruited from the community and their 24-month-old children who were slow-to-talk at 18 months old were associated with child language scores at ages 24, 36, and 48 months (n = 197). We further explored whether SJE or CJE modifed the concurrent positive…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Interventions that train parents to share picture books with children are seen as a strategy for supporting child language development. We conducted meta-analyses using robust variance estimation modeling on results from 19 RCTs (N[subscript total] = 2,594; M[subscript child age] = 1-6 years). Overall, book-sharing interventions had a small sized…

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…

Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do…

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…

This study explored participation- and impairment-based outcomes for 24 late-to-talk toddlers (M age = 20.46 months, SD = 3.09, 62.5% male) whose parents participated in Target Word™, The Hanen Program® for Parents of Children who are Late Talkers in community clinics across Ontario. Parents completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development…

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…

Purpose: In this review article, meta-analysis was used to summarize research investigating language skills in maltreated children. Method: A systematic search of published studies was undertaken. Studies were included in the meta-analysis if they investigated language skills in groups comprising maltreated and nonmaltreated children. Studies were…