Children with disabilities and developmental delays (DD) often face challenges within education systems, which are typically unprepared to meet their language needs nor equipped to support bilingualism because of the current early intervention (EI) workforce. Given this, the five-language domains framework can help bilingual EI educators to…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different…

The early home language environment, and parents in particular, form the foundation of children's language development. In this article, Dina Kapengut and Kimberly Noble explore the intersection of neuroscience and developmental psychology to explain how language experiences in the home, and the "home learning environment" more broadly,…

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…

Despite intentions to raise children in two home languages, non-Japanese bilingual homes may be encouraging the development of the societal language in children born in Japan. This article investigates: (1) the language use of two trilingual mothers with their developing trilingual children, and (2) how the mothers respond to their children's use…

Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn…

Research Findings: The toddler stage is a unique developmental period of early childhood. During this stage, children are developing autonomy, self-regulation, and language capabilities through interactions with significant adults in their lives. Increasing numbers of toddlers are being enrolled in child care. This article focuses on the need to…

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…