Digital media is becoming increasingly prevalent in households and classroom settings lowering the age of first exposure to technology; however, little is known about how children experience digital media and how their experiences relate to learning and social engagement. In this case study, we followed a 28-month-old boy in a naturalistic setting…

A wealth of studies have investigated numerical abilities in infants and in children aged 3 or above, but research on pre-counting toddlers is sparse. Here we devised a novel version of an imitation task that was previously used to assess spontaneous focusing on numerosity (i.e. the predisposition to grasp numerical properties of the environment)…

This study examined the performance of the First Year Inventory (FYI; version 2.0), a community-normed parent-reported screening instrument, in a high-risk (HR) sample of 12-month-olds with older siblings diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The FYI 2.0 was completed by parents of 86 HR infants and 35 low-risk control infants at age…

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk--talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend--at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text…

Effects of "joint attention" were addressed on 3- to 4-year-olds' performance in a verbal false-Belief Test (FBT), featuring the experimenter as co-watcher rather than narrator. In two experiments, children (N = 183) watched a filmed-FBT jointly with a test leader, disjointed from a test leader, or alone. Children attending jointly with…

One of the most popular and widely used parent report instruments for assessing early language acquisition is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). This study compares normative data of the Italian Words and Sentences complete form (WS-CF) and short form (WS-SF). The samples included 752 children for the WS-CF and 816…

Current theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study,…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by early and pervasive deficits in social orienting and social engagement. Although parent-implemented interventions using a range of responsive interactive techniques have demonstrated effectiveness to increase social engagement, more work is needed to examine how best…

Theoretical models posit real-time bidirectional processes between parents and children as integral to child development, yet few studies have examined such processes. In this study, cross-lagged autoregressive latent growth models were used to assess the dynamic organization of mother and toddler behavior across a snack-delay task. Maternal…

Studies on fathers with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are quite rare in deaf education; if they are conducted, they narrowly focus on preschool-age or school-age children. The study reported here presents data from a survey on 92 fathers of very young DHH children with a mean age of 26 months. Questionnaires were used to measure the…

Parents of toddlers with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; high risk, HR) and parents of low risk (LR) toddlers with typically-developing older siblings read a wordless picture book to their child at 22 and 28 months. Parents' and toddlers' internal state language (ISL) was coded; parents reported on toddlers' use of ISL.…

Intervention research is increasingly conducted in community settings, however it is not clear how well practices are sustained locally or how children progress once external research support is removed. Two school-year cohorts of toddlers with autism (year 1: n = 55, year 2: n = 63) received Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and…

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from…

Early intervention services are intended to be family-centered, meaning families are honored, respected, and involved in service delivery (Dunst, 2002). However, little research has been conducted to explore family perceptions of their participation in early intervention services. This study explored 12 families' perceptions about their…

In early 2017, Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) was awarded $2 million in funding from the governor of Georgia to be used for infant/toddler (I/T) language and literacy activities. DECAL used this funding to create Project LITTLE (Lifting Infants and Toddlers Through Language-rich Environments). Project…