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…

This meta-analysis examined associations between the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input and children's language. Pooled effect size for quality (i.e., vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity; k = 35; N = 1,958; r = .33) was more robust than for quantity (i.e., number of words/tokens/utterances; k = 33; N = 1,411; r = .20) of…

Short term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance consistently predict language abilities in children with developmental language disorders. However, causality is not fully established. Moreover, evidence from the fine-grained analysis of STM/WM tasks and comprehension of complex sentences, suggests that long term memory (LTM)…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

Spontaneous verbal repetition is part of early adult-child conversational interchanges. However, most of the studies devoted to verbal repetition analyse child-produced and adult-produced repetition independently. The aim of this study is to analyse verbal repetition sequences that are extended by children and adults participating in turns. We…

Researchers consistently report that children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families have, on average, smaller vocabularies as assessed by measures of existing vocabulary knowledge than children from higher SES families. Yet, few studies have examined the word-learning process of children from low SES families. The present study was an…