This longitudinal study assessed three acoustic components of maternal infant-directed speech (IDS) -- pitch, affect, and vowel hyperarticulation -- in relation to infants' age and their expressive vocabulary size. These three individual components were measured in IDS addressed to infants at 7, 9, 11, 15, and 19 months (N = 18). All three…

The purpose of this review was to introduce readers of "Child Development" to the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) technique. Provided are a background to the MASEM approach, a discussion of its utility in the study of child development, and an application of this technique in the study of reading comprehension (RC)…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to analyze the changes in temporal synchrony between gesture and speech of multimodal communicative behaviors in the transition from babbling to two-word productions. Method: Ten Spanish-speaking children were observed at 9, 12, 15, and 18 months of age in a semistructured play situation. We longitudinally…

The aim of this research is to explore what may characterise teaching in language, communication and multilingualism in preschools, as expressed in writing by preschool teachers and managers in 10 Swedish municipalities in 2016. The data consists of written answers to an open-ended question in a reflective document. The reflective document was…

Objective: Identifying which preterm children (PT) are at increased risk for language and learning differences increases opportunities for participation in interventions that improve outcomes. Speed in spoken language comprehension at early stages of language development requires information processing skills that may form the foundation for later…

A central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g., "The boy gave a present to the girl" ? "The boy gave the girl a present"), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors…

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support…

The purpose of this study was to examine attention allocation in toddlers who were late talkers and toddlers with typical language development while they were engaged in a word-learning task in order to determine if differences exist. Two-year-olds who were late talkers (11) and typically developing toddlers (11) were taught twelve novel…

Purpose: In this article, we review the role of retrieval practice on the word learning and retention of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Following a brief review of earlier findings on word learning in children with SLI and the assumptions behind retrieval practice, four experiments are described that compared novel words…

This systematic review study synthesizes research findings pertaining to the use of augmented reality (AR) in language learning. Published research from 2014 to 2019 has been explored and specific inclusion and exclusion criteria have been applied resulting in 54 relevant publications. Our findings determined: (a) devices and software employed for…

Despite their demographic importance in U.S. classrooms, little is known about how the strengths and needs of English learners are engaged through technology, particularly as it is embodied by one-to-one devices such as iPads and Chromebooks. An exploratory study of English learners in technology-enhanced classrooms was undertaken at an urban…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

Background: Although plausible links between language development and personality have been suggested, longitudinal studies of these associations into adulthood have not been conducted. Aim: To investigate whether children's age at attaining language milestones is associated with later adult personality. Methods: Mothers' of 8,400 children from…

There is vast potential for digital screens to support early bilingualism. For the most part, however, young children require human mediation with what is generated by screens in order for language and pre-literacy learning to occur. What does that mediation look like when multimodal elements are designed to support children's language and culture…

Purpose: Although school-age children learn most new word meanings from surrounding context, the joint roles of language ability and executive function (EF) in the word learning process remain unclear. This study examined children's acquisition of word meanings from context in relation to oral language ability and three EF skills (working memory,…