This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0;9 or 0;10 to 2;0--two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of…

This study examines literacies practiced in bilingual households located in emerging communities along the Texas-Mexico border known as border colonias. Drawing on theoretical notions of space as geographic and temporal, the simultaneity of global and local forces at work in colonias, and expressions of agency that are "in between"…

This research aims to develop instruments to assess language development in under-3s and the adult interventions that support it. After an extensive literature search, observations were conducted in 17 groups of children spread over two day-care centres. In total 42 children were observed during a 30-minute slot and 25 adults during a half day.…

We investigated Early Head Start home visitors' use of evidence-based practices and the effectiveness of a web-based system to support these practices. Home visitors learned to use 3 evidence-based practices: (a) frequent assessment of children's early communication for screening and progress monitoring, (b) 2 home-based language promoting…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Although emerging evidence suggests that parental behavior is related to the development of child executive functioning (EF), the mechanisms through which parenting affects child EF have yet to be investigated. The goal of this study was to examine the potential mediating role of child language in the prospective relation between maternal autonomy…

A formative experiment investigated how two strategies aimed at increasing the quality and quantity of language interactions could be integrated into a preschool classroom. Strategies for enriching language interactions were introduced during book sharing, semi-structured group activities, and mealtimes. Mixed methods revealed factors that…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the language status of 120 young, Latino dual language learners living in poverty in the United States. Maternal language input and home language and literacy environments were examined with regard to language development at 24 and 36 months. Results suggested that even when combining English and Spanish…

Following a biopsychosocial model, the study investigated the role of child factors (gender, IQ), maternal factors (psychological distress, maternal education and vocabulary, maternal distress) and environmental factors (SES) in the relationship between language impairment and behaviour problems in preschool children. Participants were drawn from…

As infant/toddler programs encounter growing diversity, they need to reenvision the impact they have on children and families in all areas of practice, from recruiting new enrollees to stocking classrooms to changing the ways adults interact with children and families with different languages and from different cultures. What happens on the first…

This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features that form ECs; namely, existential "there," the copula, definiteness, and agreement for English and existential "fii," definiteness,…

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anaphora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year-olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing…

Teacher talk is a powerful classroom tool. Studies document the importance of teacher language in children's development, in early literacy development, in children's perceptions of self and others, and in facilitating play. This article examines "teacher talk" and its elements--kinds of language, functions of language, promoting children's…

This study examines the interacting roles of implicational markedness and frequency from the joint perspectives of formal linguistic theory, phonological acquisition and computational modeling. The hypothesis that child grammars are rankings of universal constraints, as in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004), that learning involves a…