For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine…

The study adopts a naturalistic perspective, looking at the relationship between socio-economic status (SES), activities and variation sets in child-directed speech (CDS) to Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers. It aims to determine the effect of SES and type of activity on the proportion of words and utterances in variation sets and on the…

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research has primarily involved English-speaking populations and considered only mothers' child-directed speech. This study analyzes the effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative properties of linguistic…

This study examines the quantity and quality of child-directed speech across household activities in a socioeconomically diverse sample of Argentinian Spanish-speaking children, an understudied population. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours. The middle two hours were transcribed and analysed…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…