The aim of this study was to analyse the existence of differences in lexical development as a function of day care attendance and maternal education. Data were collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The reports of 2084 toddlers were analysed. The results for toddlers older than 24 months…

Purpose: In this study, we aimed to identify common language sample practices of professionals who work with children who are Deaf/hard of hearing (DHH) who use listening and spoken language as a means to better understand why and how language sampling can be utilized by speech-language pathologists serving this population. Method: An electronic…

In 1995 scientists, educators, and policymakers were startled by the claim that low-income children in the United States heard 30 million fewer words than their middle-income peers. Because language is the single best predictor of later academic readiness, this gap can have consequences for children in school and beyond. Language researchers know…

The development of literacy skills prior to the classroom has been established as essential for future school and life successes. However, the present achievement gap between lower-socioeconomic neighborhoods and their higher-income counterparts illustrate vast dissimilarities in early childhood provisions for quality reading materials and…

Purpose: The toddler years are a critical period for language development and growth. We investigated how event-related potentials (ERPs) to repeated and novel nonwords are associated with clinical assessments of language in young children. In addition, nonword repetition (NWR) was used to measure phonological working memory to determine the…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss reading comprehension deficits in adolescents in relation to their word reading skills and lexical and syntactic development. Although reading comprehension strategies (e.g., "Find the main idea") are often recommended, it is argued that before these can be effective, students'…

The goal of this study was to investigate non-adjacent consonant sequence patterns in target words during the first-word period in infants learning American English. In the spontaneous speech of eighteen participants, target words with a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (C[subscript 1]VC[subscript 2]) shape were analyzed. Target words were grouped into…

The frequency of occurrence of words and sounds has a pervasive influence on typically developing children's language acquisition. For instance, highly frequent words appear earliest in a child's lexicon, and highly frequent phonemes are produced more accurately. This study evaluates (a) whether word frequency influences word accuracy and (b)…

Language development is a significant milestone in the infant/toddler years; vocabulary by 2 years of age is predictive of later school success. It has been recognized within the bioecological systems theoretical framework that language develops as a result of an interplay between characteristics of the child, features of the setting, and…

This study investigates preschoolers' ability to understand and produce novel metonyms. We gave forty-seven children (aged 2;9-5;9) and twenty-seven adults one comprehension task and two elicitation tasks. The first elicitation task investigated their ability to use metonyms as referential shorthands, and the second their willingness to name…

The article examines the role of infant-directed vocabulary (IDV) in infants language acquisition, specifically addressing the question of whether IDV forms that are not prominent in adult language may nonetheless be useful to the process of acquisition. Japanese IDV offers a good test case, as IDV characteristically takes a bisyllabic…

This article introduces this special issue by declaring that the studies contained here build on the idea that multilinguals, in the sense of learners or speakers that have more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire, are different from bilinguals and monolinguals in various ways. Several authors in the area of third language…

Do properties of a word's features influence the order of its acquisition in early word learning? Combining the principles of mutual exclusivity and shape bias, the present work takes a network analysis approach to understanding how feature distinctiveness predicts the order of early word learning. Distance networks were built from nouns with edge…

This protocol presents the plan for a systematic review that investigates the effect of oral language interventions for children with intellectual disability (ID), language disorder (LD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Down syndrome (DS), Williams syndrome (WS), and fragile X syndrome (FXS). Language development is a highly frequent area of…

Purpose: The general aim of this study is to enhance our understanding of the patterns of language growth in Spanish and English during the school years. In this study, we used a longitudinal retrospective approach to explore the growth of the percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) in both Spanish and English in 2 groups of English learners…