During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

According to the findings of several studies, parents' assessments of their toddler's language are valid and reliable evaluations of children's language competence, especially at early development stages. This study examined whether preschool teachers, who spend a relatively great deal of time with toddlers in various preschool activities and…

This study applies the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance measurement (PMLU; Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002) to the data of five children acquiring Finnish and evaluates their phonological development longitudinally at four different age points: 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6. The children's results on PMLU and related measures are discussed…

The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance were applied to the three longest utterances…

Significant relationships were found between linguistic maturity of children, speech of parents, and children's helping behavior. Mean length of utterance was a better predictor of cooperative behavior than child age; no comparable relationships were found for parents' nonverbal behaviors. Results support a hypothesis of verbal mediation of…

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…

This study examined the relationship between presurgery speech measures and speech and language performance at 39 months as well as the relationship between early postsurgery speech measures and speech and language performance at 39 months of age. Fifteen children with cleft lip and palate participated in the study. Spontaneous speech samples were…

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

The purpose of this study was to measure fathers' and mothers' linguistic involvements with the development of communication between young siblings. A total of 39 2-parent families with 2 children were videotaped in semi-structured activities in a laboratory setting. The older sibling was from 18- to 26-months-old and the younger was from 4- to…

Working class and upper-middle class mothers were videotaped interacting with their toddlers in four settings. Samples of the mothers' adult-directed speech were also collected. Observed were social class differences in the mothers' child-directed speech and some parallel differences in the mothers' adult-directed speech. This may reflect more…

Fifty-seven children, aged 23-28 months, were assessed using the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development, mean length of utterance, and Minnesota Child Development Inventory (MCDI). The MCDI Expressive Language scale was found to be a valid predictor of expressive language. The MCDI Comprehension-Conceptual scale appeared to assess both…

The purpose of this study was to provide descriptive information about low-income fathers' and mothers' talk to toddlers and to re-examine the bridge hypothesis (Gleason, 1975) in light of current changes in family structure and childcare responsibilities. Thirty-three father-child and mother-child dyads were videotaped during semi-structured free…