The speech register that adults especially caregivers use when interacting with infants and toddlers, that is, infant-directed speech (IDS) or baby talk, has been reported to facilitate language development throughout the early years. However, the neural mechanisms as well as why IDS results in such a developmental faciliatory effect remain to be…

Previous research shows that infants of parents who are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with them tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is "how" social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger…

Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

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…

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired…

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 compares parental pause and utterance duration in conversations with Swedish speaking children at age 1;6 who have either a large, typical, or small expressive vocabulary, as measured by the Swedish version of the McArthur-Bates CDI. The adjustments that parents do when they speak to children are similar across all three vocabulary…

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an…

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother-infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants' vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother-infant toy play at…

Fathers' child-directed speech across two contexts was examined. Father-child dyads from sixty-nine low-income families were videotaped interacting during book reading and toy play when children were 2;0. Fathers used more diverse vocabulary and asked more questions during book reading while their mean length of utterance was longer during toy…

This study examined potential differences in vocabulary found in picture books and adult's speech to children and to other adults. Using a small sample of various sources of speech and print, Hayes observed that print had a more extensive vocabulary than speech. The current analyses of two different spoken language databases and an assembled…

The present study investigates whether four- and six-year-old children use pragmatic competence as a criterion for learning from someone else. Specifically, we ask whether children use others' adherence to Gricean maxims to determine whether they will offer valid labels for novel objects. Six-year-olds recognized adherence to the maxims of…

Teaching sign language--to deaf or other children with special needs or to hearing children with hard-of-hearing family members--is not new. Teaching sign language to typically developing children has become increasingly popular since the publication of "Baby Signs"[R] (Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1996), now in its third edition. Attention to signing with…

Parents' object labels can be distinguished by whether the child is already attending to the object (follow-in) or not (lead-in). Lead-in labels have been found to be associated with low vocabulary. The current study examines whether the relation between lead-in labels and child vocabulary is influenced by whether the child's attention is…

A study investigating a mother's use of discussion of picture books as a language acquisition strategy is reported, and the usefulness of establishing routine items and constructions in such discussion is examined. Use of the situation-specific approach to studying input language is also discussed. (MSE)