Retrospective studies indicate 2 major classes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) onset: early and later, after a period of relatively healthy development. This prospective, longitudinal study examined social, language, and motor trajectories in 235 children with and without a sibling with autism, ages 6-36 months. Children were grouped as: ASD…

The French language development of children adopted (n = 24) from China was compared with that of control children matched for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. The children were assessed at 50 months of age, on average, and 16 months later. The initial assessment revealed that the 2 groups did not differ with respect to socioemotional…

This study examined associations between peers' expressive language abilities and children's development of receptive and expressive language among 1,812 four-year olds enrolled in 453 classrooms in 11 states that provide large-scale public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs. Higher peer expressive language abilities were positively associated with…

This longitudinal study modeled growth rates, from ages 4.5 to 11, in English and Spanish oral language and word reading skills among 173 Spanish-speaking children from low-income households. Individual growth modeling was employed using scores from standardized measures of word reading, expressive vocabulary, and verbal short-term language…

Associations between parenting quality and 3-year-olds' school readiness, receptive, and expressive language were examined in relation to the amount of time they spent in childcare, based on data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,364). Associations for school readiness and receptive language were stronger among…

Examines children's strategies in language production. Focuses on how children in early stages of language acquisition talk about objects, spatial relations, and actions, and the extent to which they rely on general purpose terms in all three domains. (JMB)

The concurrent and predictive relations of sensorimotor behavior and play to language in the second year were assessed among 19 preterm and 20 full-term infants tested at 13 1/2 and 22 months of age. Numerous associations between play and language were identified; sensorimotor behavior and language in the same age period were relatively loosely…

Assessed representational abilities in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Found group differences in expressive and receptive language based on maternal report and on experimenter assessment, but no differences emerged in child solitary symbolic play or in child- or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play.…

Investigated associations between expressive language and symbolic play in deaf children with deaf parents or with hearing parents, and hearing children with hearing parents. Defined three language level groups. Hearing status was associated with duration of symbolic play. Higher language levels were associated with more canonically sequenced and…

Examines young children's developing ability to talk about emotions, considers evidence concerning the ability to talk about emotions in the conduct of interpersonal interaction, and offers ideas about future directions for research, emphasizing the functionalist approach to the analysis of emotion-denoting terms. (HOD)

This paper examined associations between mothers' work schedules and children's cognitive outcomes in the first 3 years of life for approximately 900 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care. Both the timing and duration of maternal nonstandard work schedules were examined. Although…

Examined contributions of dimensions of maternal responsiveness to timing of milestones in early expressive language development. Found that maternal responsiveness at 9 and 13 months predicted timing of language milestones over and above children's observed behaviors. Responsiveness at 13 months was a stronger predictor of timing than…

Addressing methodological limitations, Study One compared parent-child interactions of normal and language-delayed children; Study Two investigated whether mothers adjust the length of their utterances to the child's ability to comprehend or to produce language; Study Three probed interactional variables associated with variations in the…

Examined morphosyntax in persons with Williams Syndrome (WS). Analyzed receptive language of English-speaking WS persons and grammatical gender assignment of French-speaking WS persons. Found within-domain dissociations in grammatical gender assignment across several sentence elements and difficulties in understanding embedded sentences, which…