Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This…

The interplay between self-regulation related skills and language is well recognized in dynamic theories, but few empirical studies have tested it, especially in toddlers. The current study examines the bidirectional links between self-regulation related skills and expressive vocabulary in a longitudinal study during toddlerhood. Participants were…

Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

The prevalence of late language emergence (LLE) in young children is high, comprising 10 to 20% of toddlers. Late language emergence refers to children who do not use at least 50 single words and 2-word phrases at the age of two. Current best practices for the under-three population with or at risk of having disabilities include the use of…

This study aimed to adapt and validate the Word Complexity Measure (WCM) for Persian-speaking toddlers. The WCM is a tool for assessing phonological complexity, originally proposed by Stoel-Gammon. The study was conducted in two phases: (1) adapting the WCM parameters to the Persian language and (2) conducting a validation study with 60…

This study examined the effectiveness of the "Thrive by Three" intervention for 1- to 3-year-old's language development. Data from 78 childcare centres, 187 toddler classrooms, and 1561 children (91.4% native Norwegian) were included. Results revealed that children in the intervention group had slightly steeper language development than…

Purpose: Measuring the growth of young children's vocabulary is important for researchers seeking to understand language learning as well as for clinicians aiming to identify early deficits. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are parent report instruments that offer a reliable and valid method for measuring early…

A majority of children's language learning experiences occur in inclusive early child care and education settings. Few evidence-based professional development (PD) programs exist to empower early childhood education providers to use language instruction practices with children in inclusive classrooms. There is little research on providers'…

Background: The Language Development Survey (LDS) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) are two parental report forms that have been productive in providing data on early child language during the past 30 years. The instruments have been used both in studies relating to typical developing children and in screening…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) treatment on toddlers' expressive vocabulary and phonology. Parent acceptability of VAULT treatment was also considered. Method: We used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline single case experimental design with three late talking toddlers aged 21-25…

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of the size and composition of the expressive vocabulary of young children speaking two dialectal varieties of South American Spanish. Ninety-one Peruvian and 91 Argentinian toddlers (mean age: 22.5 months), matched on gender, age and maternal education, were assessed through the respective…