The current study examined the interaction between maternal depressive symptoms and child temperament in predicting subsequent child language skills. Participants were 252 mother-child dyads recruited from the All Our Families longitudinal cohort, a primarily middle-class sample (62.9% completed postsecondary education) from Alberta, Canada (90.5%…

Understanding the role of negative emotionality in the development of executive functioning (EF) and language skills can help identify developmental windows that may provide promising opportunities for intervention. In addition, because EF and language skills are, in part, genetically influenced, intergenerational transmission patterns are…

This study aimed to test a 5-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children's school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness…

Recent studies demonstrate that emerging literacy depends on earlier language achievement. Importantly, most extant work focuses on "parent-reported production" prior to 30 months of age. Of interest is whether and how "directly assessed vocabulary comprehension" in the 2nd year of life supports vocabulary and kindergarten…

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically…

This study examined mother-child shared book reading behaviors before and after participation in a random-assignment responsive parenting intervention called Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) that occurred during infancy (PALS I), the toddler-preschool (PALS II) period, or both as compared with a developmental assessment (DAS) intervention (DAS…

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that…

Two experiments examined young children's sensitivity to linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Results showed that children who did not produce articles in spontaneous speech were able to distinguish between sentences, verbally presented in picture identification tasks, that contained grammatical articles and those that…

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

Tested predictions of infantile amnesia theory compared with social-interactionist account of autobiographical memory. Found maternal reminiscing style and self-recognition when child was 19 months old uniquely predicted children's shared memory reports across time, even with children's initial language and nonverbal memory factored out.…

Twelve two year olds were taught novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Children's interpretation of the relations between the nouns was mediated by the similarity of the objects, a result that suggests that, by age two, children have the conceptual and lexical abilities necessary for establishing hierarchical relations. (LB)

Development of children's vocabularies for gender-typed words and communicative actions was investigated longitudinally from 13 to 36 months and in a group of 9.5-month-olds. Vocabularies of gendered words were assessed using lists of adult-rated gender-typed words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; L. Fenson et…

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Explores the relations among combinatorial capacities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and nonsemantic action sequences within a sample of 18- to 24-month-old children, as well as assessing the developmental level of a selected subset of concepts. (HOD)

Examined the communicative behavior of 40 maltreated and nonmaltreated 31-month-old toddlers and their mothers. Results revealed that maltreated toddlers followed a pattern of shorter mean length of utterance, less descriptive speech, and proportionally less relevant speech. (RJC)