The paper examines publication trends in the United States regarding literacy development in toddlerhood from 1990 to 2009, exploring what features or elements of toddlers' literacy development have been documented, and how they have been documented, over the last 20 years, to indicate areas for further exploration. Articles were carefully selected with predetermined exclusion criteria within five chosen databases that cover professional and scholarly peer-reviewed journals in a variety of areas in education. The selected articles then were analyzed and categorized with predefined categories: publication year, type of article, participants, methodology, research setting, and purpose(s) of study.