Our main objective was to analyze the role of imageability in relation to the age of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS) and their peers with typical development (TD). The AoA of nouns and verbs was determined using the MacArthur-Bates CDIs adapted to the profile of children with DS. The AoA…

While socioeconomic disparities in the home language environment have been well established, the mechanisms explaining these disparities are poorly understood. One plausible mechanism is heightened stress. The current study investigated whether maternal perceived stress was 1) associated with measures of the home language environment, and 2)…

Background: Rapid naming refers to the duration required to swiftly and accurately identify a set of familiar visual stimuli. Rapid naming serves as a significant indicator of the efficiency with which phonological information can be retrieved from memory, playing a crucial role in the advancement of language and literacy competencies. Aim: This…

Introduction: Children's early language and communication skills are efficiently measured using parent report, for example, communicative development inventories (CDIs). These have scalable potential to determine risk of later language delay, and associations between delay and risk factors such as prematurity and poverty. However, there may be…

The current study used a multiple baseline across behaviors design to evaluate a rapid coaching intervention for teaching two caregivers to implement naturalistic language interventions (NLIs) with their child with autism. Coaches were preservice behavior analysts completing a personnel preparation program in applied behavior analysis who…

Background: This study explores how family language policies (FLPs) in multilingual homes where isiXhosa is the primary language influence caregiver choices regarding children's language development and education. Objectives: The study aims to give insight on how non-nuclear family structures in a selected sample of Western Cape families are…

Metaphors are frequently used in daily life. Many children on the autism spectrum have difficulties in comprehending and generating metaphors. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an equivalence-based instruction (EBI) procedure aimed at improving comprehension and expression of emotions in metaphors. Four Chinese boys on the spectrum…

Daily language interactions predict child outcomes. For multilingual families who rear neurodiverse children and who may be minoritized for their language use, a dearth of research examines families' daily language interactions. Utilizing a language socialization framework and a case study methodology, 4,991 English and Spanish utterances from a…

This study investigated differences in adult-child language interactions when parents and their three-to-four-year old children engage in wordless book reading, text-and-picture book reading and a small-world toy play activity. Twenty-two parents recorded themselves completing each activity at home with their child. Parent input was compared…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group.…

The association between decontextualized talk (DT; i.e., talk extending beyond immediate context) and child language outcomes is well-attested but not well-understood. This study tested the hypothesis that DT is more linguistically complex than contextualized talk (CT). Thirty-eight Norwegian children (M[subscript age] = 5.5 years; 25 girls; 30…

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…

Person-referring pronouns in the first and second person (I, your) have been viewed as signs of increasing social understanding in children due to their shifting reference properties. However, they are linguistically complex elements and might depend on general language development. We used longitudinal transcript data from Manchester corpus (12…

Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders (M[subscript age] = 7.33,…

Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning "variable form use." Although I applaud Shin and Miller's focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data…