Computers, laptops, digital tablets, and whiteboards are all commonly used technologies in classrooms today. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased use of digital technology to offer virtual learning and maintain social connections. Given the multifaceted nature of technology, the complexities of child development, and the increasing…

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) conducted a landscape evaluation of early childhood programs in Indiana (IN) between the spring of 2021 and the summer of 2022. Commissioned by Early Learning Indiana (ELI), this study provides Indiana programs and policymakers with research-based information on the quality of a sample of…

Toddlers from low-income and language-minority immigrant families are at risk for language difficulties due to early disparities in the quality of their home language environment. The present longitudinal study extends previous research by investigating nursery teachers' communicative modalities and functions, and their relations with the…

This study aims to enhance our knowledge of the associations between the quality of the language-learning environment in toddler childcare groups and children's vocabulary development from age 3 to age 5. Participants were 1,131 children (48% girls; age at T1 assessment: M = 35.5 months, SD = 2.7; age at T2 assessment: M = 60.3 months, SD = 1.4)…

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) conducted a landscape evaluation of early childhood programs in Indiana (IN) between the spring of 2021 and the summer of 2022. The evaluation included assessments of infant, toddler, and preschooler children's developmental status in multiple domains at two time points to measure growth.…

Background: Early intervention for children identified as late talkers (LTs) at the age of 24 months is still a controversial issue in research and clinical routine. Previous studies have shown inconsistent results regarding predictors of early lexical deficits on school-age outcomes of late-talking toddlers. Methods: In a five-wave follow-up…

Spontaneous verbal repetition is part of early adult-child conversational interchanges. However, most of the studies devoted to verbal repetition analyse child-produced and adult-produced repetition independently. The aim of this study is to analyse verbal repetition sequences that are extended by children and adults participating in turns. We…

Child-directed speech (CDS), which can help children learn new words, has been rigorously studied among infants and parents in home settings. Yet, far less is known about the CDS that teachers use in classrooms with toddlers and children's responses, an important question because many toddlers, particularly in high-need communities, attend…

This qualitative study investigated the methods used in teaching English vocabulary to very young children (i.e. toddlers) at a bilingual school in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Not much research has been published on teaching English to toddlers in the EFL context; therefore, this research is important as the results can become additional input to L2…

Partnerships are dynamic, negotiated spaces encompassing community organizations and interprofessionals. Partnerships support young children and families as they transition from home to school. Interprofessionals create a culture for learning and accessible resources. Early childhood centers, public health and libraries develop collaborative…

Background: The facilitating role of sleep for language learning is well-attested in adults and to a lesser extent in infants and toddlers. However, the longitudinal relationship between sleep patterns and early vocabulary development is not well understood. Methods: This study investigates how measures of sleep are related to the development of…

Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated the…

Background: Little empirical research examines the process in which home literacy environment (HLE) in toddlerhood is associated with preschoolers' vocabulary and decoding skills using a large-scale dataset. Objective: The purposes of the current study were to (a) examine the differential effect of HLE in toddlerhood on preschoolers' vocabulary…

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…