Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where…

Others' emotional expressions affect individuals' attention allocation in social interactions, which are integral to the process of word learning. However, the impact of perceived emotions on word learning is not well understood. Two eye-tracking experiments investigated 78 British toddlers' (37 girls) of 29- to 31-month-old retention of novel…

The purpose of the study was to examine word learning in preschool children from families who differed in socioeconomic status (SES). Preschool children (N = 58) were assigned to SES groups based on maternal education and completed a dynamic assessment of explicit word learning 2 times. At the first administration, no SES-group differences were…

It was still true that some children came to school with a smaller vocabulary than their peers (David, 2010, Duff & Brydon, 2020; Templin, 1957; White, Graves, & Slater, 1990). If students did not have enough word knowledge to access the correct meanings of the words they read in text, they failed to comprehend those texts and struggled to…

Young children seem to pick up words quickly, almost effortlessly, through various media in the early years. Studies have shown that storybooks, TV, screen media, and ebooks can all be sources for incidental word learning without formal instruction. Yet, typically, research has investigated learning from a single medium in isolation or in…

Young children seem to pick up words quickly, almost effortlessly, through various media in the early years. Studies have shown that storybooks, TV, screen media, and ebooks can all be sources for incidental word learning without formal instruction. Yet, typically, research has investigated learning from a single medium in isolation or in…

Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

Social mastery motivation and parental response are important correlates of children's vocabulary and self-regulation skills, but little research has examined their relationships collectively. This study investigated the direct relationships among social mastery motivation (active interaction and positive affect frequencies), parental response,…

This research takes a dyadic approach to study early word learning and focuses on toddlers' (N = 20, age: 17-23 months) "information seeking" and parents' "information providing" behaviors and the ways the two are coupled in real-time parent-child interactions. Using head-mounted eye tracking, this study provides the first…

In this update of a bestselling classic, you will learn how to develop children's capacity and will to read. Each sequential chapter is practical, eye-opening, and exactly what you need to engage young learners, plan lessons, partner with parents, and align your PreK-3 classrooms to the science of learning and the science of reading. Gain the…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic…

The present study aimed to investigate whether and how Chinese single character reading and 2-character word reading can reflect somewhat different processes. Tasks of Chinese rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and nonverbal intelligence tasks,…

Children can learn words incidentally from stories. This kind of learning is enhanced when stories are presented both aurally and in written format, compared to just a written presentation. However, we do not know why this bimodal presentation is beneficial. This study explores two possible explanations: whether the bimodal advantage manifests…

This study investigates the levels of social language and vocabulary characteristics of three- to six-year-old children with autism in Vietnam. The research is based on analysis of the developmental assessment reports of 151 children with autism, and 42 parents' reports on their children's vocabulary (recorded using the Child Word Inventory form).…