Clinical Questions: Would a child who is a late talker (P) show greater improvement with parent-implemented intervention models (I) or with clinician-directed intervention models (C) as shown by improvements in expressive language skills (O)? If so, under what circumstances? Method: Literature Review. Study Sources: Education Source, ERIC,…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

Purpose: Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish-English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method: Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to…

It is not well understood how grammar emerges in very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children. The main aim of the present study was to gain information on the emergence of grammar in this group at 2; 0. The Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory was used to collect data from VLBW children ("N" = 156) and full-term controls…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

Intensive behavioral intervention for young children diagnosed with autism can produce large gains in social, cognitive, and language development. Although several studies have identified behaviors that are possible indicators of best outcome, changes in performance are typically measured using norm-referenced standardized scores referencing…

Oxytocin seems associated with parenting style, and experimental work showed positive effects of intranasally administered oxytocin on parenting style of fathers. Here, the first double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject experiment with intranasal oxytocin administration to fathers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is…

We compared ratings on the Three-Item Direct Observation Screen test for autism spectrum disorders completed by pediatric residents with the Social Communication Questionnaire parent reports as an augmentative tool for improving autism spectrum disorder screening performance. We examined three groups of children (18-60 months) comparable in age…

Temperament atypicalities have been documented in infancy and early development in children who develop autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study investigates whether there are differences in developmental trajectories of temperament between infants and toddlers with and without ASD. Parents of infant siblings of children with autism…

Contrast information could be useful for verb learning, but few studies have examined children's ability to use this type of information. Contrast may be useful when children are told explicitly that different verbs apply, or when they hear two different verbs in a single context. Three studies examine children's attention to different types of…

Children recruit verb syntax to guide verb interpretation. We asked whether 22-month-olds spontaneously encode information about a particular novel verb's syntactic properties through listening to sentences, retain this information in long-term memory over a filled delay, and retrieve it to guide interpretation upon hearing the same novel verb…

To explore how being at high risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), based on having an older sibling diagnosed with ASD, affects word comprehension and language processing speed, 18-, 24- and 36-month-old children, at high and low risk for ASD were tested in a cross-sectional study, on an eye gaze measure of receptive language that measured how…

Challenging behaviors are frequently studied in individuals with various developmental disabilities, although specific conditions are rarely compared to one another. Such data would be informative to clinicians who assess and develop treatment plans for children with these disabilities. For that reason, the current study's aim was to analyze…

Purpose: Two-year-olds produce third person singular "-s" more accurately on verbs in sentence-final position as compared with verbs in sentence-medial position. This study was designed to determine whether these sentence-position effects can be explained by perceptual factors. Method: For this purpose, the authors compared 22- and 27-month-olds'…

Early attachment has both protective and risk factors as regards later mental health. In Finland, insecure-avoidant-type attachment is overrepresented. Does this indicate a risk for emotional and behavioural problems at preschool age? In this study, we examined and compared the association between attachment and mental health in Finnish singletons…