Language difficulties are frequently characterized by a significantly lower mean length of utterances (MLU) among children experiencing neglect. More opportunities to experience positive interactions, such as in early childhood education (ECE) settings, could help increase these children's MLU. This study aims to examine the relationship between…

Preschoolers participated in a modified version of the disambiguation task, designed to test whether the pragmatic environment generated by a reliable or unreliable speaker affected how children interpreted novel labels. Two objects were visible to children, while a third was only visible to the speaker (a fact known by the child). Manipulating…

Evidence to support stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) in speech acquisition is less than robust, calling into question the ability of SSP to reliably establish automatically reinforcing properties of speech and limiting the procedure's clinical utility for increasing vocalizations. We evaluated the effects of a modified SSP procedure on…

Research over the past several decades has provided insight into the processes that govern early brain development and how those processes contribute to behavior. In this article, the authors provide an overview of early brain development beginning with a summary of the prenatal period. They then turn to postnatal development and examine how brain…