Purpose: The aim of this study is to determine if there is a specific association between motor delays and receptive and expressive language function, respectively, in prematurely born children. Method: Retrospective data review: 126 premature children = 1,250-g birthweight from English-speaking families were evaluated on motor development…

This paper reports the preliminary results of a study examining the role of structural overlap, language exposure, and language use on cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual first language acquisition. We focus on the longitudinal development of determiners in a corpus of two French-English children between the ages of 2;4 and 3;7. The…

Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not…

Children learn words by listening to caregivers, and the quantity and quality of early language input predict later language development. Recent research suggests that word recognition efficiency may influence the relationship between input and vocabulary growth. We asked whether language input and lexical processing at 28-39 months predicted…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24-32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop…

In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms' lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher-child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and…

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…

Purpose: This study reexamines the claim that difficulty forming memories of words comprising uncommon sound sequences (i.e., low phonological neighborhood density words) is a determinant of delayed expressive vocabulary development (e.g., Stokes, 2014). Method: We modeled communicative development inventory data from (N = 442) 18-month-old…

Late language emergence (LLE) may result from genetic and environmental factors. Little is known about environmental factors in LLE in South Africa. The study describes the nature of differences in language functioning between toddlers with LLE and without LLE, and which factors were associated with LLE in a middle-income area in South Africa.…

The present study explored the relationship between amount of dual language exposure, parents' language quality and bilingual competence among Chinese American children with autism spectrum disorder by using a cross-sectional correlational design. Thirty parent-child dyads participated in this study. Survey and observational data were collected…

Research Findings: This study examined the association between interactive book reading quality and prekindergarten children's gains in language and literacy skills over the course of an academic year for 96 teachers and 417 children across multiple locations in the United States. Two moderators were examined, namely, children's initial skill…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…

Purpose: Both theoretical models of infant language acquisition and empirical studies posit important roles for attention to speech in early language development. However, deaf infants with cochlear implants (CIs) show reduced attention to speech as compared with their peers with normal hearing (NH; Horn, Davis, Pisoni, & Miyamoto, 2005;…