Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine…

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an…

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 aimed to investigate the role of leptin, ghrelin, neuropeptide Y, and nesfatin-1 in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A total of 44 children with ASD and 44 healthy controls aged 18-60 months were included. Plasma levels of hormones were measured using commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits. Plasma leptin…

This study documents the effects of social inequality on different dimensions of lexical comprehension in Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers, a population in which socioeconomic differences are more striking than in previously studied populations. Using a performance-based forced-choice lexical recognition task implemented on a tablet, an…

This study estimated ASD prevalence in a cohort of 3-year-old very preterm children (N = 55) and investigated the usefulness of parent-reported ASD screeners and the ADOS-2. 12.7% received an ASD diagnosis by clinical judgment based on DSM-5 criteria. An additional 14.5% were classified as having a broader-autism-phenotype outcome. Sensitivity…

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that…

This investigation examined the existence of interconnectedness between developing linguistic subsystems. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 31 typically-developing Greek-speaking toddlers across two age levels, at 28 and 36 months. Correlational analyses were performed synchronically and predictively, revealing significant positive…

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

Children learn to perform actions on artifacts in their environments from infancy, but the ways caregivers support this learning during everyday interactions are relatively unexplored. This study investigated how naturalistic caregiver-child teaching interactions promoted conventional action learning in toddlers. Caregivers of 32 24- to…

Early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) provides the best opportunity for children to receive evidence-based early intervention. Research indicates that accurate diagnosis can be made as early as the toddler period when an assessment is completed by experienced clinicians. Typical ASD evaluations involve an assessment of…

Internalising problems are common within Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); early intervention to support those with emerging signs may be warranted. One promising signal lies in how individual differences in temperament are shaped by parenting. Our longitudinal study of infants with and without an older sibling with ASD investigated how parenting…

Looking to the mouth of a talker early in life predicts expressive communication. We hypothesized that looking at a talker's mouth may signal that infants are ready for increased supported joint engagement and that it subsequently facilitates prelinguistic vocal development and translates to broader gains in expressive communication. We tested…

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd-edition (ADOS-2) Toddler Module is the current gold-standard measure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental condition more frequently diagnosed in toddler boys than girls. Some evidence suggests that behaviors assessed by the Toddler Module may capture an ASD phenotype that is more…