Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months…

Coviewing is a commonly recommended practice, but little is known about how coviewing impacts children's educational media viewing experience. We investigated how coviewing impacts attention and comprehension of educational media, as well as the role of baseline vocabulary in understanding these associations. Eighty-three preschoolers viewed two…

This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different…

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we…

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs, parent-completed language development checklists) are a helpful tool to assess language in children who are unused to interaction with unfamiliar adults. Generally, CDIs are completed in written form, but in developing country settings parents may have insufficient literacy to complete them alone. We…

Research Findings: The roles of child lexical diversity and maternal sensitivity in the development of young children's inhibitory control were examined in 100 low-income Hispanic Spanish-speaking children. Child communication utterances at age 2½ years were transcribed from 10-min mother-child interactions to quantify lexical diversity. Maternal…

Patterns of growth in one language in relation to growth in the other and also with respect to growth in both languages were studied in a group of 20 bilingual (English/Spanish) infants ages 10 to 30 months. The rate and pace of development were similar in both groups; differences among the bilinguals included their use of "referential"…

This study examined the effects of maternal directive and nondirective styles of interaction on the emergence of verbal communicative intent in toddlers, and sought to understand the association between maternal interaction styles and young children's pragmatic acquisition. During free play, maternal utterances of 12 mother-child dyads, with…

Presents four articles in the context of workshop discussions on characteristics of environments that promote language development: (1) "Children's Conversations: Why are They Important?"; (2) "Ways of Talking: Respecting Differences"; (3) Paul's Talk: Teachers and Parents Look at a Child's Language"; and (4) "In the…

Three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs were analyzed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Results revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies and that imitation aided the children in learning the lexicon, making phonological approximations of…