This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…

This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of the size and composition of the expressive vocabulary of young children speaking two dialectal varieties of South American Spanish. Ninety-one Peruvian and 91 Argentinian toddlers (mean age: 22.5 months), matched on gender, age and maternal education, were assessed through the respective…

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that typically developing children, verbal children with a diagnosis of autism, children with Down syndrome, children with developmental language disorder, and children with dyslexia can all benefit from orthographic support during word learning tasks. This study sought to determine if minimally speaking…

This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Specific features of adult linguistic input may play a larger, or smaller role, at different child ages, across different language outcomes, in different cohorts. This prospective, longitudinal study explored associations between the quantity and quality (i.e. diversity and responsiveness) of maternal linguistic input and child language. This…

Cross-lagged panel analysis was used to examine associations between two joint engagement variables; higher order supported joint engagement and higher order supported joint engagement that co-occurs with caregiver's follow-in talk (higher order supported joint engagement + follow-in), and expressive and receptive vocabulary in a group of young…

Children learn the words of their native language(s) from interactions with their caregivers. Although previous research has found that the language children hear during those interactions predicts vocabulary outcomes, few studies have investigated how qualitative features of social interactions work together to affect children's vocabulary…

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In…

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…

The present study explored the relationship between amount of dual language exposure, parents' language quality and bilingual competence among Chinese American children with autism spectrum disorder by using a cross-sectional correlational design. Thirty parent-child dyads participated in this study. Survey and observational data were collected…

Background: An association between social disadvantage and early language development is commonly reported in the literature, but less attention has been paid to the way that different aspects of social disadvantage affect both expressive and receptive language in the first 2 years of life. Aims: To examine the contributions of gender, parental…

Preschool children's vocabulary mainly develops verbal through interaction. Therefore, the technology-enhanced storytelling (TES) activity Jeffy's Journey is developed to support parent-child interaction and vocabulary in preschool children. TES entails shared verbal storytelling supported by a story structure and real-time visual, auditory and…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate language growth in individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) from early childhood to adolescence and the influence of maternal responsivity on language growth. Method: We conducted a longitudinal analysis of language development in 55 youths (44 males, 11 females) with FXS. Data collection spanned…

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental…