This study examined implementation of a newly developed shared book reading intervention program, to boost infants' early skills and provide a solid foundation for continued language learning. A randomised control study was conducted to elevate the effects of Shared Book Reading Intervention with 20 parents (n = 10 experiment, n = 10 control) and…

Human infants show a robust preference for speech over many other sounds, helping them learn language and interact with others. Lacking a preference for speech may underlie some language and social-pragmatic difficulties in children with ASD. But, it is unclear how an early speech preference supports later language and social-pragmatic abilities.…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to identify predictors of expressive vocabulary in young Spanish-speaking children who are deaf or hard of hearing living in the United States. Method: This cross-sectional study considered 53 children with bilateral hearing loss between 8 and 34 months of age ( M = 24, SD = 6.9). Demographic variables,…

Programs serving infants and toddlers are expected to use child data to inform decisions about intervention services; however, few tools exist to support these efforts. The Making Online Decisions (MOD) system is an adaptive intervention that guides early educators' data-based intervention decision making for infants and toddlers at risk for…

Programs serving infants and toddlers are expected to use child data to inform decisions about intervention services; however, few tools exist to support these efforts. The Making Online Decisions (MOD) system is an adaptive intervention that guides early educators' data-based intervention decision making for infants and toddlers at risk for…

This article describes the development and validation of the Developmental Snapshot, a 52-item parent questionnaire on child language and vocal communication development that can be administered monthly and scored automatically. The Snapshot was created to provide an easily administered monthly progress monitoring tool that enables parents to…

A randomized control intervention study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the highly structured Heidelberg Parent-Based Language Intervention (HPLI). The outcomes of 43 children (n = 23 intervention, n = 20 control) who had been identified as late talkers during routine developmental check-ups carried out in pediatric practices at the age…

This study examined the impact of training mothers to talk elaboratively about the past on children's understanding of mind. The researchers randomly assigned 102 mothers of 19-month-old children to a training or no-training group. Mothers in the experimental group received training in an elaborative style of talking about the past when children…

Purpose: We sought to identify factors predictive of or associated with receipt of speech/language services during early childhood. We did so by analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; Andreassen & Fletcher, 2005), a nationally representative dataset maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. We…

This paper reports the outcome of a multi-sensory intervention on infant language skills. A programme titled "Rhyming Game and Exercise Club", which included kinaesthetic-tactile mother-child rhyming games performed in natural joint attention situations, was intended to accelerate Finnish six- to eight-month-old infants' language development. The…

Existing studies of child care have not been able to determine whether higher quality child care protects children from the effects of poverty, whether poverty and lower quality child care operate as dual risk factors, or whether both are true. The objective of the current study was to test two pathways through which child care may serve as a…

This study examined the expressive communication and language of seven hearing mothers and their deaf infants. Total communication intervention programming was begun before 9 months of age, and communication behaviors were observed during free play when infants were 12 and 18 months old. Other data were obtained in structured interviews with…

The PLS-4 (Preschool Language Scale, 4th edition) is a psychometrically sound instrument constructed to assess language skills in children from birth to 6 years 11 months. It is a useful diagnostic and research tool that can be used to identify current comprehension and expressive language skills and can measure changes in language skills over…