Book-sharing with young children is an established vehicle for promoting early language development and pre-literacy skills. Although parents are widely encouraged to read to their child and existing interventions provide instruction on book-sharing strategies, there is a prominent lack of guidance for parents on how to choose the book itself.…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

Background: Speech and language acquisition can be a challenge for young children with Down syndrome (DS), and while early intervention is important, we do not know what early interventions exist and how effective they may be. Aims: To systematically review existing early speech, language and communication interventions for young children with DS…

Linguistic interactions between parents and their children are frequently studied to investigate how children acquire language. From observations, researchers have identified interaction strategies that foster children's language development. In turn, interventions to support children's early language skills employ styles of interaction derived…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

It is expected that students who learn Indonesian will be able to communicate both orally and in writing. However, students continue to face numerous difficulties when confronted with Indonesian conversation, such as feeling uncomfortable, stammering, or simply remaining silent when they are asked about their opinions. As such, this study will…

Telepractice offers speech-language pathologists (SLPs) increased flexibility to support language development, including emergent literacy in clients with complex communication needs. However, clinicians may feel uncertain how to pair books with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) over telepractice. Following an overview of…

How does language shape mathematical development? In this article, we consider this question by reviewing findings from cross-sectional and longitudinal research. In this literature, we find that differences in the structures of languages and individual variations in language ability are associated with mathematical performance in both obvious and…

From early in life, infants synchronize with others on a physiological level, a process thought to underlie social connections and group cohesion. This synchronization is seen, for example, when their pupils dilate in response to observing another person with dilated pupils -- known as "pupillary contagion." There is mixed evidence on…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

The purpose of this pilot study was to measure the effects of experiential learning on graduate students' use of facilitative language techniques (FLTs) to support language development in young children from a high poverty population. Seven CSD graduate students who participated in a language seminar received direct instruction in and experiential…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

Integration of social-emotional learning (SEL) content and vocabulary within read-alouds of multicultural literature provides powerful learning contexts for enhancing young children's social problem-solving, language development, and comprehension. Multicultural literature allows children to gain greater understanding of themselves and others…

The authors conduct a broad, cross-cultural review of the literature in fields such as psychology, education, speech-language pathology, early intervention, and library science concerned with board games and learning in young children. They include experimenter-developed and commercial board games and children's learning in mathematics, science,…

In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person…