Research findings: No research to date has compared mental state language (MSL) in conversations between children and different adult talk partners, such as mothers and educators. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of MSL (verbalization of mental states such as remembering, knowing and thinking) by children, educators, and mothers…

Research regarding specific strategies adolescent mothers (AMs) may utilize to facilitate early language and emergent literacy skills in their children is lacking. This exploratory study investigated AMs' perceived use of preselected common language and emergent literacy strategies and correlated their use of these strategies to their children's…

There is strong evidence that movement and learning are deeply interlinked supporting effective cognitive functioning and thinking. The link between movement and learning constitutes a new pedagogical paradigm in the contemporary field of language learning and specifically in the area of Embodied Pedagogy and learning. Embodied theories argue that…

We compared the structure and the content of mothers' and fathers' infant-directed speech as a function of infant birth order. Seven first-born and four second-born infants were video-recorded during their natural dyadic interactions with their mothers and fathers at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15-day intervals.…

Research shows that maternal education influences children's academic performance indirectly through the quality of the home environment. In this study, we tested the role of 12 variables within the home environment (e.g., eating meals together, reading for fun at home, number of children's books, watching TV, and bedtime) to help identify those…

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French-learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language-general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of…

How do children infer the meaning of a word? Current accounts of word learning assume that children expect a word to map onto exactly one concept whose members form a coherent category. If this assumption was strictly true, children should infer that a homophone, such as "bat," refers to a single superordinate category that encompasses…

Although toddlers in their 2nd year of life generally have phonologically detailed representations of words, a consistent lack of sensitivity to certain kinds of phonological changes has been reported. The origin of these insensitivities is poorly understood, and uncovering their cause is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of early…

Infants start learning words, the building blocks of language, at least by 6 months. To do so, they must be able to extract the phonological form of words from running speech. A rich literature has investigated this process, termed word segmentation. We addressed the fundamental question of how infants of different ages segment words from their…

This article investigates the relationship between third person singular present tense agreement morphemes, copula "is" and verb-"s", at 2;00 and 2;03. Language samples from 60 children at 2;00 were analyzed for the productivity of copula "is" as measured by the number of different morphemes preceding "is"…

Purpose: This longitudinal study examined the development of prelinguistic skills and the continuity of communication and language from the prelinguistic stage to school age. Method: Prelinguistic communication of 427 Finnish children was followed repeatedly from 6 to 18 months of age (n = 203-322 at ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months), and its…

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

Being able to communicate one's wants and needs is an essential step in typical language development. However, children with diagnosed language delays, which constitute approximately 5-10% of children under three years, may reach this step later than typically developing children. According to Rossetti (2001), communication skills are the most…

Large gaps in cognition and language on the Bayley-III between the top and bottom household wealth quartiles in 1,330 children aged 6-42 months in a representative sample of low- and middle-income families in Bogota were previously shown. Maternal education and the home environment mediated these wealth effects, whereas height-for-age mediated a…

Infants in low-resource settings are at heightened risk for compromised cognitive development due to a multitude of environmental insults in their surroundings. However, the onset of adverse outcomes and trajectory of cognitive development in these settings is not well understood. The aims of the present study were to adapt the Mullen Scales of…