Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from…

The objective of this study was to examine the links between prosodic features of paternal Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and child characteristics. Pitch variability measures were extracted from the speech samples of 50 fathers during unstructured play with their two-year-old children. Evidence for a link between child receptive language ability…

There is considerable controversy over the factors that shape infants' developing knowledge of grammar. Work with artificial languages suggests that infants' ability to track statistical regularities within the speech they hear could, in principle, support grammatical development. However, little work has tested whether infants' performance on…

Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

Several aspects of early language skills, including parent-report measures of vocabulary, phoneme discrimination, speech segmentation, and speed of lexical access predict later childhood language outcomes. To date, no studies have examined the long-term predictive validity of novel word learning. We examined whether individual differences in novel…

The present study examined early vocabulary development in fifty-nine French monolingual and fifty French-English bilingual infants (1;4-1;6). Vocabulary comprehension was assessed using both parental report (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; CDI) and the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT). When assessing receptive vocabulary…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1 ; 6 () or 1 ; 3, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 9 () and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CDI, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Words &…

Differential attention of two-month-old infants to synthetically generated and naturally produced rising and falling intonation contours was studied, and it was learned that infants attended more to naturally produced rising contours and synthetically generated falling contours. Use of the infant-control auditory preference paradigm was also…

The relationship of object permanence and classification skills to receptive and expressive language development was investigated in infants. Object permanence, classification, and parent-child verbal interaction ratings were about equally related to language comprehension functioning, while permanence was more strongly related to language…

When vocalizations of three-month-olds (N=40), experiencing either conversational turn-taking or random responsiveness of an adult, were counted and categorized, results indicated that turn-taking caused changes in the quality of vocal sounds. When the adult maintained a give-and-take pattern, the infants produced a higher ratio of…

Analysis of a one-year-old's lexical development suggested factors causing overextensions: using known words for more recently acquired or unknown words; expressing incomplete knowledge of defining features of two or more similar meaning words; producing overextensions of preferred words; using phonologically simpler more than difficult words; and…

Maternal ostensive naming was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 12 children. Display, demonstration, and pointing were coded with regard to whether and how coexisting speech referred to gesture focus. Maternal input was found to be significantly correlated with children's reported receptive vocabulary. (Author/JL)