The extant literature on the use of autonomy support during caregiver-child conversations has focused primarily on conversations about fun, shared experiences, with limited consideration of unshared experiences or attention toward the role of conversation context. The present study examined how autonomy support, conversation context, and child age…

Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, that is, it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive…

Although there have been calls in the early childhood field for effective approaches to preparing the workforce to support optimal early child development, there is a gap in understanding how different types of professional development predict teachers' beliefs about children and their self-reported classroom practices. Using the National Survey…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are associated with adaptive function impairments. This study measured adaptive functioning in a sample of 92 children with ASD, including 80 children with co-occurring ADHD. Regression models examined whether ASD and ADHD symptom severity were associated with…

Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech…

A prevailing theory of mathematical problem solving predicts that children will be less accurate solving a + b = c + __ problems versus a + b = __ + c. However, this has never been tested directly. Because of low base rates, information combined from multiple studies can help improve estimation accuracy and precision. This study compared…

Purpose: Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ in child and adult speech. Method: In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve…

Research suggests that individual differences in math abilities correlate with approximate representations of quantity that are supported by a primitive Approximate Number System (ANS). However, relatively little research has addressed the direction of this association in early childhood. Here we examined the development of the ANS and math…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

We examined how emotional and communication functioning at kindergarten predicted the academic trajectories of refugee children. Drawing from a population-based Canadian cohort, the study followed 629 refugee children from age 5 to 13 and (i) modeled kindergarten, Grade 4, and Grade 7 academic trajectories via group-based trajectory modeling and…

Most studies of the early origins of adult health rely on summing dichotomously measured negative exposures to measure childhood misfortune (CM), neglect, adversity, or trauma. There are several limitations to this approach, including that it assumes each exposure carries the same level of risk for a particular outcome. Further, it often leads…

Oral language development is a key outcome of elementary school, and it is important to identify factors that predict it most effectively. Commonly researchers use ordinary least squares regression with conclusions restricted to average performance conditional on relevant covariates. Quantile regression offers a more sophisticated alternative.…

This article outlines the "over-pruning hypothesis" of autism. The hypothesis originates in a neurocomputational model of the regressive sub-type (Thomas, Knowland & Karmiloff-Smith, 2011a, 2011b). Here we develop a more general version of the over-pruning hypothesis to address heterogeneity in the timing of manifestation of ASD,…

Adult humans process communicative interactions by recognizing that information is being communicated through speech (linguistic ability) and simultaneously evaluating how to respond appropriately (social-pragmatic ability). These abilities may originate in infancy. Infants understand how speech communicates in social interactions, helping them…

The relationships between early maternal social support, maternal psychological well-being, the home learning environment, and children's language skills at age 3 in Korean families were examined. We hypothesized that maternal social support would predict children's language development through its effect on maternal psychological well-being and…