Purpose: This study evaluates the impact of temporal synchrony between maternal touch and speech on children's early language development. It investigates whether the proportion of word-touch co-occurrence, overlap, and alignment precision in maternal input influences language acquisition, hypothesizing that such synchrony boosts infants'…

A basic question about bilingual development is how the acquisition of one language affects the acquisition of the other. Previous findings are few and mixed. The present study addressed this question with longitudinal data on the dual-language vocabulary growth of 149 US-born children from Spanish-speaking immigrant families, who were followed…

Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

This study investigated developmental pathways between early language and later social skills in a large, prospective cohort consisting of 3387 mother-child dyads. Mediational pathways were examined between parent-reported expressive language (at 2 years of age) and social skills (at 8 years of age), via core language and pragmatic language (at 5…

Purpose: Prior work has found that "late talkers" (LTs) as a group continue to demonstrate lower language and reading outcomes compared to their typically developing (TD) peers even into young adulthood. Others identified that children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) show difficulties later with theory of mind (ToM)…

Purpose: Despite known motor and spoken language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the motor skills underlying speech production and their relationship with language skills have rarely been directly investigated in this population. Method: Thirty-nine autistic children (14 minimally verbal [MV], 25 verbal [V]) and 11 non-autistic…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with cochlear implants (CwCIs) constitute a heterogeneous population. A multitude of factors influence their spoken language development. There is evidence that CwCIs follow similar trajectories in language development as typically developing (TD) children but there is a lack of research on specific types of…

Purpose: Toddlers with Down syndrome (DS) showcase comparable or higher rates of gestures than chronological age-- and language-matched toddlers without DS. Little is known about how gesture use in toddlers with DS relates to multiple domains of development, including motor, pragmatics, language, and visual reception (VR) skills. Unexplored is…

A 7-year longitudinal study was conducted as part of the French national cohort ELFE (N = 1095). The aim was to identify how and why early language skills at 2 years might predict later literacy skills assessed successively at 5, 7, and 9 years (LitSk5y; 7y; 9y). Using one and the same model, we also examined the relations between literacy skills…

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…

Background: Children's language abilities set the stage for their education, psychosocial development and life chances across the life course. Aims: To compare the efficacy of two preschool language interventions delivered with low dosages in early years settings (EYS): Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST) and an Adapted Derbyshire Language…

Background &aims: Language abilities of autistic children and children at elevated likelihood for autism (EL-siblings) are highly heterogeneous, and many of them develop language deficits. It is as of yet unclear why language abilities of autistic children and EL-siblings vary, although an interaction of multiple influential factors is likely…

Background: Early-language skills vary and are among the best predictors of later social and academic outcomes. High-quality early interaction supports strong early-language skills. Identifying modifiable sources of variability in early interaction quality is critical to determining intervention need, developing effective caregiver coaching, and…

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…

Background & aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition…