Whilst the role of interactive play, thought and language in children's development has been acknowledged, less is known of the role of interactive play, thought and "music." Children's early music-making is both generative and performative in nature and provides a means by which they engage with self and others. Their independent…

This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and…

Parent-child discourse in family settings provides insights into children's language socialization. In her seminal work on language socialization, Ochs (1993) argues that social identities are essentially constructed by verbal performance and the display of social acts and stances. This paper presents a single case analysis of a family dinner…

Recently emerging intervention studies for toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were reviewed through a systematic assessment of intervention outcomes, research rigor, and intervention features. The review includes published peer-reviewed experimental studies of toddlers with high risk for or diagnosis of ASD in which the majority of…

Collaborative early intervention (EI) service delivery is enhanced by professional development focused on knowledge and skills in the content and process of delivering services. This article describes a multicomponent online professional development course designed to build infant toddler specialists' capacity to support children with…

Teachers have a unique position and opportunity by virtue of their profession to be able to present and guide students along a path of discovery. Educators, mentors, parents, communities are all responsible for accomplishing milestones when considering closing the achievement gap for students of various cultural, social, and economic backgrounds…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

An exploratory case study was undertaken to investigate the perspectives and experiences of six early intervention providers as they adopted and implemented a collaborative consultation approach to home visiting in urban neighborhoods. Survey, semistructured interview, and focus group methods were used over a 2-year period to obtain data about…

This article describes some of the foundational social contracts about written texts that two-year-olds and their teachers were negotiating in a U.S. preschool writing center. Social contracts are shared cultural knowledge that individuals draw on to produce and use written texts in culturally appropriate ways. Participants in this study were 18…

Three studies (N=144) investigated how toddlers aged 18 and 24 months pass the surprise-mark test of self-recognition. In Study 1, toddlers were surreptitiously marked in successive conditions on their legs and faces with stickers visible only in a mirror. Rates of sticker touching did not differ significantly between conditions. In Study 2,…

Preferential-looking studies suggest that by 2 months of age, infants may have knowledge about some object properties, such as solidity. Manual search studies of toddlers examining these same concepts, however, have failed to provide evidence for the same understanding. Investigators have recently attempted to reconcile this disparity but failed…

Language is a child's major tool for learning about the world. This book presents a naturalistic case study of one child's use of language from two-and-a-half to five years, drawing on systemic functional theory to argue that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process and offering a new description and interpretation of linguistic…

Published articles about assistive technology (AT) from 1980 through 2004 were reviewed to identify those that focused on infants and young children. A total of 104 articles about AT with infants and toddlers were identified, and of these, 23 reported practices for teaching switch activation (12), computer use (6), power mobility skills (4), or…

A comparison is presented of a mother's language to her Down Syndrome two-year-old and his normally developing twin. When interacting with the Down Syndrome twin, the mother used shorter mean length of utterance, greater type-token ratio, more confirmations, more verbal directives, fewer yes-no and true questions, and more directive questions.…