Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not…

Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…

Children who rapidly recognize and interpret familiar words typically have accelerated lexical growth, providing indirect evidence that lexical processing efficiency (LPE) is related to word-learning ability. Here we directly tested whether children with better LPE are better able to learn novel words. In Experiment 1, 17- and 30-month-olds were…

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that…

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object--word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids)…

Children and youth rely on language skills to navigate environments, many of which are multifaceted and complex. In a society in which successful interactions involve language and prosocial behavior, children who struggle with language or classroom behavior are predisposed to failure. The present perspectives article (a) summarizes the comorbidity…

Objective: The purpose of this article is to estimate the overall weighted mean effect of the relation between early language skills and later behavior problems in school-aged children. Method: A systematic literature search yielded 19,790 unduplicated reports, and a structured search strategy and identification procedure yielded 25 unique data…

Emergent literacy skills develop from a child's experiences with spoken language in social interactions, written words through storybook reading, and opportunities to interact with print in the environment. These emergent literacy experiences provide a foundation for conventional literacy skills. A congenital visual impairment (that is, blindness…

Children learn words by listening to caregivers, and the quantity and quality of early language input predict later language development. Recent research suggests that word recognition efficiency may influence the relationship between input and vocabulary growth. We asked whether language input and lexical processing at 28-39 months predicted…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate typical Spanish-English speech sound development longitudinally in a group of bilingual preschoolers enrolled in a Head Start Program and to examine the extent to which such development is linked to language proficiency. The study also aimed to identify whether speech development is related…

Several federal mandates have eradicated developmentally appropriate early literacy practices in primary grade classrooms across the country. Studies show that patterns of oral language use are developed extensively during the preschool years and lay a foundation for literacy development. In recent years, high quality pre-kindergarten classrooms…

Research Findings: This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted with infants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as "confirm"…

This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch…

Sentences involving definite DPs can give rise to a "simultaneous" reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the time introduced by the verb's tense or an "indexical" reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the utterance time. This article discusses an experiment showing that children prefer…

The educational path of an English-language learner in California is affected by federal, state, and local educational policy, mandates, and practices. According to the research, after 40 or so years of government intervention from the Bilingual Act of 1974 to Proposition 38 of 2016, school districts continue to have large numbers of…