Statistically, women, particularly pregnant women and new mothers, are at heightened risk for depression. The present review describes the current state of the research linking maternal depressed mood and children's cognitive and language development. Exposure to maternal depressive symptoms, whether during the prenatal period, postpartum period,…

We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…

This study describes the vocal development of infants born with very low birth weights (VLBW). Samples of vocalizations were recorded from three groups of infants when they were 8, 12 and 18 months of age: preterm VLBW infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), preterm VLBW infants without BPD, and healthy full-term infants. Infants with BPD…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…

This paper reviews research on the consequences of prenatal exposure to alcohol and cocaine on children's speech, language, hearing, and cognitive development. The review shows that cognitive impairment, learning disabilities, and behavioral disorders are the central nervous system manifestations of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), and cranio-facial…

Based on ecological theory, this study examined how four components of children's home and child-care literacy environments, and the connections between these environments, were associated with preschool-age children's literacy and language development. Interview and standardized assessment data were collected from 85 preschool-age children, their…

When a behavior disappears and then resurfaces, developmental psychologists typically look more closely at the behavior to figure out what is different before and after--that is, they increase the grain with an eye toward discovering how the system that generates that behavior has changed. But what ought to count as a U-shaped phenomenon? How…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Individual differences in nonword repetition (NWR) show a particularly strong association with vocabulary acquisition for both first- (L1) and second-language (L2) learners, and they serve as a behavioral marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in children (Gathercole, 2006). However, this association is susceptible to alternative…

Within child language acquisition research, there has been a fair amount of controversy regarding children's knowledge of the grammatical properties associated with verbal inflection (e.g., tense, agreement, and aspect). Some researchers have proposed that the child's early grammar is fundamentally different from the adult grammar, whereas others…

Infants' understanding of "toy model-real exemplar" relations was assessed through preferential looking and habituation tasks. Results from the preferential looking task suggest that 18-month toddlers are just beginning to demonstrate comprehension of symbolic relations between iconic models and their real object counterparts. Performance of 10-…

Although schools across the country are investing heavily in computers in the classroom, there is surprisingly little evidence that they actually improve student achievement. In this paper, we present results from a randomized study of a well-defined use of computers in schools: a popular instructional computer program, known as Fast ForWord,…

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most names contain the relevant sounds. In Experiment 1 (n=45), children in an experimental group learned English letter names for letter-like symbols. Some of these names contained the…

Background: Velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS, 22q 11.2 deletion) is characterized by severely delayed language development. The current study explored the integrity of verbal short-term memory (STM), a cognitive function critically involved in language development, in eight children with VCFS. Methods: Using a multiple case study design, we…

At 3 years of age the spontaneous language of 17 typically developing children was compared to two groups of toddlers who were at risk for language delay for very different reasons. One at-risk group, late talkers, appeared normal in all respects except for their delayed language. These 20 children scored at or below the fifteenth percentile for…