The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…

Mutual exclusivity (ME) refers to the assumption that there are one-to-one relations between linguistic forms and their meanings. It is used as a word-learning strategy whereby children tend to map novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. Previous research has indicated a relation between ME and vocabulary development, which…

Although caregiver narrative elaboration is seen as a critical dimension for children's development of narrative skills, research has yet to show a predictive relation between caregiver elaboration and child outcomes for low-income Latino children. The present study explored whether specific types of narrative elaboration were predicted by and…

This article analyses how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects of word class, frequency, imageability and…

Given the dependent nature of parent-infant interactions necessary for language development, it is important to understand how context may influence these interactions. This study examines how contextual variables influence communicative, cognitive and social measures of parent-infant interactions. Specifically, how do feedback toys and…

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…

This study reported the development and initial validation of the Survey of Parent/Provider Expectations and Knowledge (SPEAK), a self-administered questionnaire assessing expectations and knowledge about early childhood cognitive and language development. Development of the SPEAK was guided by the theory emphasizing the role of language input…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…

The objective of this study was to investigate changes in the natural language environments of families with typically-developing infants receiving language feedback in South Korea. Volunteer parents of 99 children aged 4-16 months were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. During 6 months' intervention, the experimental group…

This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6-8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential…

Previous research has shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had difficulty integrating narrative information coherently. The majority of these studies focused on people narrating in English; however, little is known about the narrative abilities of Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. This study investigates the ability of…

This article describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production…

This study examined the validity and reliability of different measures of morphosyntactic complexity, including the Morphosyntactic Complexity Scale (MSCS), a novel adaptation of the Developmental Sentence Scoring, in French-speaking school-aged children. Seventy-three Quebec children from kindergarten to Grade 3 completed a definition task and a…