What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N =…

Childcare services are widely used by families and thereby exert an important influence on many young children. Yet, little research has examined whether childcare may impact the development of child executive functioning (EF), one of the pillars of cognitive development in early childhood. Furthermore, despite persisting hypotheses that childcare…

This study examines the role of language environment (number of conversational turns) in the development of socioemotional competencies between 18 and 30 months. The language environment of 43 infants and their social-emotional competencies were measured at 18 months and again at 30 months. Multiple regressions showed a significant contribution of…

Infants experience language in rich multisensory environments. For example, they may first be exposed to the word applesauce while touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing applesauce. In three experiments using different methods we asked whether the number of distinct senses linked with the semantic features of objects would impact word recognition…

Children with delays in expressive language (late talkers) have heterogeneous developmental trajectories. Some are late bloomers who eventually "catch-up," but others have persisting delays or are later diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD). Early in development it is unclear which children will belong to which group. We…

Mature social evaluations privilege agents' intentions over the outcomes of their actions, but young children often privilege outcomes over intentions in verbal tasks probing their social evaluations. In three experiments (N = 118), we probed the development of intention-based social evaluation and mental state reasoning using nonverbal methods…

The speech register that adults especially caregivers use when interacting with infants and toddlers, that is, infant-directed speech (IDS) or baby talk, has been reported to facilitate language development throughout the early years. However, the neural mechanisms as well as why IDS results in such a developmental faciliatory effect remain to be…

Inhibitory control (IC) is a core executive function integral to self-regulation and cognitive control, yet is itself multi-componential. Directed global inhibition entails stopping an action on demand. Competitive inhibition is engaged when an alternative response must also be produced. Related, but not an executive function, is…

Previous research has shown a strong positive association between right-handed gesturing and vocabulary development. However, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear. In the current study, we tested whether gesturing with the right hand enhances linguistic processing in the left hemisphere, which is contralateral to the right hand.…

Inhibitory control (IC) emerges in infancy, continues to develop throughout childhood and is linked to later life outcomes such as school achievement, prosocial behavior, and psychopathology. Little, however, is known about the neural processes underpinning IC, especially in 2-year-olds. In this study, we examine functional connectivity (FC) in…

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two…

To reveal the formation process of speech processing with early hearing experiences, we tracked the development of functional connectivity in the auditory and language-related cortical areas of 84 (36 female) congenitally deafened toddlers using repeated functional near-infrared spectroscopy for up to 36 months post cochlear implantation (CI).…

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. "The boy lorped the cat"), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. "feed") (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, [Yuan, S.,…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

Children vary in how sensitive they are to experiences, with consequences for their developmental outcomes. In the current study, we investigated how behavioral sensitivity at age 3 years predicts mental health in middle childhood. Using a novel repeated measures design, we calculated child sensitivity to multiple psychological and social…