The current study explored the link between mouthing and fingering and vocal behaviours directed to objects and caregivers. Nine infants were tracked from the ages of 8-16 months by video recording their mouthing and fingering vignettes and vocal behaviours and vocal behaviours resulting in a total of 2,061 coded behaviours. Microanalysis revealed…

Creating an environment suitable for language acquisition through shared reading significantly contributes to improving a child's language development and parent-child relationship. Reading in an interactive way, such as dialogic reading, is favorable. Nevertheless, dialogic reading is designed for children above the age of two and shared reading…

For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

Children's speech development begins in infancy. The pattern of this development has been explored in studies over a number of years using a range of research methodology and approaches to investigation. A systematic review of the existing literature was carried out to determine the collective contribution of this literature to our understanding…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the time course of vocal development in infants and toddlers with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs; bilateral CI group) who are acquiring Finnish and to compare their progress to that of infants with normal hearing and typical development (TD group). Method: Five thousand nine hundred…

An infant's vocal capacity develops significantly during the first year of life. Research suggests early measures of pre-speech development, such as canonical babbling and volubility, can differentiate typical versus disordered development. This study offers a new contribution by comparing early vocal development in 10 infants with Fragile X…

Purpose: A recent approach to identifying early markers of risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been to study infants who have an older sibling with ASD. These infants are at heightened risk (HR) for ASD and for other developmental difficulties, and even those who do not receive an eventual ASD diagnosis manifest a high degree of…

The purpose of this study was to establish a set of normative data (growth curve and centiles) for the Infant Monitor of vocal Production (IMP) using a representative population of infants with typically developing hearing. A linear mixed effect model and regression was used to derive 'stage-for-age' trajectory and growth centiles from the…

This investigation examined the time course and sequence of prelinguistic vocal development during the first year of cochlear implant (CI) experience. Thirteen children who were implanted between 8 and 35 months and 11 typically developing (TD) infants participated in this longitudinal study. Adult-child play interactions were video- and…

Purpose: To determine the concurrent validity of the Conditioned Assessment of Speech Production (CASP; Ertmer & Stoel-Gammon, 2008) and data obtained from speech samples recorded at the same intervals. Method: Nineteen children who are deaf who received cochlear implants before their 3rd birthdays participated in the study. Speech samples and…

Prelinguistic vocal development is "the process by which infants and toddlers produce increasingly more complex, phonetically diverse, and speech-like utterances before they say words on a regular basis" (Ertmer, 2005, p. 85). Research has shown that children with bilateral, moderate-to-profound hearing loss experience delays and deficits in vocal…

Examines phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling of infants from 7 to 11 months of age. The investigation was to verify assumptions that, in infant vocal development, there is a systematic increase in the phonetic variation of these babbles, and separate stages of repetitive and nonrepetitive babbling are posited. (22 references) (GLR)

Verbal interactions of three 2-year-old boys attending a play group were analyzed from videotapes made approximately 8 months apart. During this period, rates of interaction increased significantly, speakers learned to select message content more appropriate to the listener, and participants learned to watch each other more often. (Author/JMB)