As infants interact with the object world, they generate rich information about object properties and functions. Much of infant learning unfolds in the presence of caregivers, who talk about and act on the objects of infant play. Does mother joint engagement correspond to real-time changes in the complexity and duration of infant object…

Children learn math concepts long before they enter school. Across all cultures, children are exposed to number and spatial language to varying degrees during everyday home routines. Yet most studies of math talk occur in the lab and target non-Hispanic, English-speaking families. We expanded inquiry to the spontaneous math language (i.e., number…

Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants' active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends laboratory-based theories to identify real-world processes…

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events--moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother…

We longitudinally examined the trajectories of Latine mothers' (N = 116) language input to their children during book-sharing interactions at four points in development, when children were between ages 2 and 5 years. Mother-child dyads were video-recorded sharing a wordless picture book, and transcriptions of mothers' and children's language…

Purpose: This longitudinal study assessed continuity and stability of productive language (vocabulary and grammar) and discourse features (turn-taking; asking and responding to questions) during mother-child play. Method: Parent-child language use in 119 Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children at two ages (M = 2.5 and 3.6…

The authors examined children's access to books in 153 four-year-olds from low-income, U.S. ethnic-minority families. Mothers reported on the number of books available to their children and the variety of books their children had, such as concept books about letters, numbers, and shapes and narrative books about cultural beliefs and relationships.…

We examined associations between maternal writing support, math support, and directiveness and children's literacy and math outcomes. Participants were 208 African American, Dominican, Mexican, and Chinese mothers and their first-grade children from low-income households. Mothers were video-recorded playing a grocery game with their children…

Methods can powerfully affect conclusions about infant experiences and learning. Data from naturalistic observations may paint a very different picture of learning and development from those based on structured tasks, as illustrated in studies of infant walking, object permanence, intention understanding, and so forth. Using language as a model…

Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in a set of predictable activities over the course of a day that provide them with opportunities to hear unique language functions and forms. Mothers and their…

Caregivers' narrative elaborations have been consistently shown to relate to language, literacy, and cognitive skills in children. However, research with Latinos yields mixed findings in terms of how much caregivers elaborate and the benefits of elaborations for Latino children's development, especially within booksharing contexts. Moreover,…

We examined whether the early learning environment predicts children's 5th grade skills in 2,204 families from ethnically diverse, low-income backgrounds; tested the mediating roles of children's pre-kindergarten school-related skills and later learning environment; and asked whether lagged associations generalize across White, Black, Hispanic…

Developmental changes in the questions mothers asked during book-sharing interactions with their preschool children and associations between mothers' questions and children's narrative contributions were examined. Children and mothers from ethnically diverse backgrounds (African American, Dominican and Mexican) were video-recorded sharing the…

The present study examined book-sharing interactions between mothers and their 4-year-old children from African American (n?=?62), Dominican (n?=?67), Mexican (n?=?59) and Chinese (n?=?82) low-income U.S. families, and children's independent storytelling skills one year later. Mothers' book-sharing style was analysed in terms of…

We longitudinally investigated parental language context and infants' language experiences in relation to Dominican American and Mexican American infants' vocabularies. Mothers provided information on parental language context, comprising measures of parents' language background (i.e., childhood language) and current language use during interviews…