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This study examines correlations between the prosody of infant-directed speech (IDS) and children's vocabulary size. We collected longitudinal speech data and vocabulary information from Dutch mother-child dyads with children aged 18 (N = 49) and 24 (N = 27) months old. We took speech context into consideration and distinguished between prosody when mothers introduce familiar vs. unfamiliar words to their children. The results show that IDS mean pitch predicts children's vocabulary growth between 18 and 24 months. In addition, the degree of prosodic modification when mothers introduce unfamiliar words to their children correlates with children's vocabulary growth during this period. These findings suggest that the prosody of IDS, especially in word-learning contexts, may serve linguistic purposes.

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Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by severe communication deficits and limited and repetitive behavioral tendencies. There are several treatment approaches and methods for minimally verbal children with ASD; nonetheless, there is inconclusive evidence about how early lexical development could be improved. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of combined intervention derived from the principles of different theories-including contemporary behaviorism, schemas, sociocultural, and event representation theories-to improve early lexical development in minimally verbal children with ASD. Methods: In this single-group pretest-posttest study, 10 children with ASD (mean age, 47.9 ± 8.3 months), including 7 boys and 3 girls, participated. Participants received 16 intervention sessions in 8 weeks. The combined intervention consisted of various methods derived from contemporary behaviorism, schemas, sociocultural, and event representation approaches. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory 1 (Infant form) assessed early lexical development before and after intervention and after a 2-month follow-up. The Friedman test was used to analyze the data, and pairwise comparisons were performed with the Will-Coxon test. Cohen's d was used to investigate the effect sizes. Results: Significant increases in expressive vocabulary (P < 0.001) and receptive language (P < 0.001) were seen after the end of the intervention and at the follow-up (P = 0.005). Large effect sizes were found for expressive vocabulary (d = 3.7) and receptive vocabulary (d = 2.17). Conclusion: This study suggests that the combination of intervention based contemporary behaviorism, schemas, sociocultural, and event representation approaches improved receptive and expressive vocabulary in minimally verbal children with ASD.

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Introduction: Previous studies showed that very preterm children have a delay in communicative (gestures) and linguistic development as compared to full-term children. Earlier use of gestures, as well as of word comprehension and production, have been found to be predictive of subsequent word production and/or language delay in both very preterm and full-term children. Not many studies on communicative antecedents of language, however, have been carried out with low-risk preterm children in comparison to full-term children. Methods: In the present study a sample (N = 142) of low-risk preterm children has been followed using the Galician version of the Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) at the ages of 10, 22, and 30 months of age and their results were compared to the results from a sample (N = 49) of full-term children at the same ages. The determinants of language measures (vocabulary and grammar) at 30 months of age have been studied through linear regression analyses. Results: ANOVA results indicate that there were no significant differences between the groups in any of the measures obtained with the CDI at any time, nor were there any differences in lexical or grammatical developmental trajectories between both groups (repeated measures ANOVA). Linear regression analyses showed that the predictors of language at 30 months of age are somewhat different for the full-term than for the preterm group. Discussion: While the use of first communicative gestures at 10 months is a predictor of word production at 30 months of age for the full-term group, participation in games and routines seems to play a significant predictive role for preterm children. Word production at 22 months is the factor with a major incidence on word production at the age of 30 months for both groups. Previous specific measures of grammatical development have a clear determinant role in grammar measures at 30 months of age for the full-term children, while in the case of preterm children previous lexical development seems to be more relevant.

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Despite the wide and extensive use of mobile-assisted devices, the effectiveness of children's L1 learning with these mobile-assisted technologies has been less discussed. This study aims to explore the effects of mobile-assisted reading materials on Chinese children's L1 vocabulary learning. We adopted a longitudinal and quasi-experimental design consisting of an experiment group using the mobile-assisted materials and a control group using the traditional paper materials, and took children's lexical development as indexed by assessing the parameter, lexical diversity, in different testing times. The results showed that (1) children's L1 vocabulary learning effectiveness of using mobile-assisted materials is as similar as that of using conventional paper materials in general, and (2) the changing patterns of children's L1 lexical development using mobile-assisted materials in different testing times are various. Specifically speaking, (a) in the posttest 1 (the first month), compared with the traditional paper reading materials, the mobile-assisted reading materials have a facilitating effect on the primary school students' L1 vocabulary learning; (b) in the posttest 2 (the second month), children's vocabulary learning effectiveness is inhibited by the mobile-assisted reading materials; (c) in the delayed posttest (the fourth month), there is no difference in the learning effectiveness by these two different kinds of learning materials and the lexical diversity increases slowly but steadily. We analyzed the results from research-design factors and learner-related factors, hoping to shed light on children's mobile-assisted language learning research.

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There is considerable evidence showing that, in novel noun learning and generalization tasks, comparisons of several learning stimuli lead to more taxonomically based generalizations of novel nouns than single stimulus presentations. This study investigated the role of semantic distance (close vs. far) between learning examples and between learning examples and transfer items (near vs. distant) in comparison designs. In two experiments, we investigated the case of object nouns (e.g., foods, Experiment 1) and relational nouns (e.g., is the cutter for, Experiment 2) in 4- to 6-year-old and 3- to 4-year-old children, respectively. As predicted, the comparison conditions led to better results than the no-comparison conditions. In comparison conditions, far training items and near generalization items gave the best performance. Semantic distance effects are discussed in terms of abstracted representations during learning as well as in terms of cognitive constraints on generalization. It is argued that both object nouns and relational nouns are construed in the light of the type of example used during learning (i.e., single or multiple). Depending on the distance between learning and generalization items, children build different categories and are more or less likely to accept distant referents.

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The present study aims at obtaining a comprehensive picture of language development in Russian heritage language (RHL) by bringing together evidence from previous investigations focusing on morphosyntax and global accent as well as from a newly conducted analysis of a less-studied domain-lexical development. Our investigation is based on a narrative sample of 143 pre- and primary-school bilinguals acquiring RHL in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We performed a multiple-way analysis of lexical production in RHL across the different national contexts, across both languages (heritage and societal), also comparing bilinguals and monolinguals. The results revealed a clear and steady increase with age in narrative length and lexical diversity for all bilingual groups in both of their languages. The variation in lexical productivity as well as the differences between the bilingual groups and between bilinguals and monolinguals were attributed to input factors with language exposure in the home and age of starting preschool as the major predictors. We conclude that, overall, the results from lexical, grammatical, and phonological acquisition in RHL support the view that having longer exclusive or uninterrupted exposure to a heritage language in early childhood is beneficial for its development across domains.

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Although there is ample evidence documenting the development of spoken word recognition from infancy to adolescence, it is still unclear how development of word-level processing interacts with higher-level sentence processing, such as the use of lexical-semantic cues, to facilitate word recognition. We investigated how the ability to use an informative verb (e.g., draws) to predict an upcoming word (picture) and suppress competition from similar-sounding words (pickle) develops throughout the school-age years. Eye movements of children from two age groups (5-6 years and 9-10 years) were recorded while the children heard a sentence with an informative or neutral verb (The brother draws/gets the small picture) in which the final word matched one of a set of four pictures, one of which was a cohort competitor (pickle). Both groups demonstrated use of the informative verb to more quickly access the target word and suppress cohort competition. Although the age groups showed similar ability to use semantic context to facilitate processing, the older children demonstrated faster lexical access and more robust cohort suppression in both informative and uninformative contexts. This suggests that development of word-level processing facilitates access of top-down linguistic cues that support more efficient spoken language processing. Whereas developmental differences in the use of semantic context to facilitate lexical access were not explained by vocabulary knowledge, differences in the ability to suppress cohort competition were explained by vocabulary. This suggests a potential role for vocabulary knowledge in the resolution of lexical competition and perhaps the influence of lexical competition dynamics on vocabulary development.

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AIM: This longitudinal study investigated associations between language environment and parent-infant close contact in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and preterm children's lexical abilities. METHODS: NICU language environment of 43 very preterm infants (born<32 gestational weeks) was measured with the Language Environment Analysis System (LENA; variables: number of adult words, conversational turns, and child vocalisations). Parent-infant close contact (holding and skin-to-skin contact) in the NICU was reported using parental closeness diaries. At 15 and 18 months' corrected age, lexical development was measured with screening methods, and eye tracking-based lexical processing was assessed at 18 months. N varied between 29 and 38 in different outcome measures. RESULTS: LENA measured conversational turns and child vocalisations, and parent-infant close contact associated positively with lexical development (r = 0.35-0.57). High numbers of NICU adult words associated negatively with lexical processing (r = -0.38- -0.40). In regression models, conversational turns and parent-infant close contact explained 34%-35% of receptive development. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that adult-infant turn taking and parent-infant close contact in the NICU are positively associated with lexical development. High numbers of overheard words in the NICU may not favour later lexical processing. Further research is warranted on the significance of NICU language environment on later lexical abilities.

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Las investigaciones muestran que un número importante de niños nacidos prematuros (antes de las 37 semanas de gestación) presentan dificultades en su desarrollo, entre ellas el desarrollo lingüístico. Las investigaciones previas indican que algunas complicaciones biomédicas, como la hemorragia intraventricular (los grados III y IV), la leucomalacia periventricular y la displasia broncopulmonar, incrementan la probabilidad de presentar alteraciones en el desarrollo de la cognición y/o del lenguaje, por lo que se hace necesario realizar investigaciones que proporcionen más información y con ello poder anticiparse a posibles consecuencias en los aprendizajes futuros de estos niños nacidos bajo la condición de prematuridad. Es así, que los objetivos de este estudio fueron medir el tamaño del léxico temprano en niños muy prematuros y prematuros extremos (con y sin complicaciones biomédicas) a los 24 meses de edad corregida, así como también determinar la asociación entre número de complicaciones biomédicas presentes y el tamaño del léxico. Para ello, se trabajó con 108 niños divididos en tres grupos: 39 niños prematuros de alto riesgo (con complicaciones biomédicas), 36 niños prematuros de bajo riesgo (sin complicaciones biomédicas asociadas a alteraciones del lenguaje y /o cognición) y 33 niños nacidos de término. Todos fueron evaluados con el Inventario II de Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas MacArthur-Bates. Los resultados muestran que los niños nacidos de término tienen significativamente mayor tamaño del léxico que los prematuros, no existiendo diferencias en los resultados entre prematuros de bajo riesgo y los prematuros de alto riesgo. Por otra parte, el tamaño del léxico no presenta correlación con las complicaciones biomédicas.

Research shows that a significant number of children born preterm (before 37 weeks of gestation) have developmental difficulties, among them disturbances in language development. Studies indicate that some biomedical complications such as intraventricular hemorrhage (grades III and IV), periventricular leukomalacia, and bronchopulmonary dysplasia increase the probability of cognitive and/or language development disorders. Therefore, there is a need to conduct more studies that provide information that allows anticipating possible consequences in the learning process of children born prematurely. The aims of this study were to measure the early vocabulary size in very preterm and extremely preterm children (with and without biomedical complications) at 24 months of corrected age and to determine the association between the number of biomedical complications and vocabulary size. To that effect, we worked with 108 children divided into three groups: 39 high-risk preterm children (with biomedical complications), 36 low-risk preterm children (without biomedical complications associated with language and/or cognitive disturbances), and 33 full-term children. All children were evaluated using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory II. The results show that the vocabulary size of full-term children is significantly larger than that of preterm children and that no differences exist between the group of high-risk versus low-risk preterm children. On the other hand, vocabulary size does not correlate withbiomedical complications.

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Although linguistic and nonlinguistic cues help young children infer meaning when presented with unfamiliar words, little is known about how syntactic information and early bilingual experience shape word learning. This study examined how monolingual and bilingual 24- to 30-month-olds' disambiguation of novel words during a mutual exclusivity task differs as a function of syntactic cues, age, and productive vocabulary. English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with familiar and novel objects within a syntactic context (e.g., "Give me the blick!") or in isolation (e.g., "Blick!"). Results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals adhered to mutual exclusivity more often when provided with syntactic cues than when those cues were absent. Furthermore, bilinguals' mutually exclusive disambiguation of novel words increased with age, but only when syntactic cues were available. These results provide insight into factors that influence children's disambiguation of novel words. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

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Scale errors are intriguing developmental phenomena in which young children attempt to perform impossible object-specific actions toward miniature-sized objects. Of several related cognitive abilities, lexical development during toddlerhood enhances scale error production by making objects' semantic representations dominant over perceptual information. To directly address the effect of activated semantic representations on scale errors, we examined whether and when object labeling affected scale errors. Toddlers aged 18 to 30 months (N = 72) performed a body-based scale error task twice: in one session with specific object labels provided (e.g., "chair") and in the other session with general pronouns provided (e.g., "this"). Using different developmental indices, including chronological age and productive vocabulary size of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, the enhancement effect of object labeling was detected only for children whose verb vocabulary size was classified into the medium group (3-26 words). Moreover, verb vocabulary size was determined to be the best predictor of scale error production among the candidate developmental indices. We also found that toddlers produced more scale errors in the first session that they performed the task compared with the second session. In addition to revealing that careful control of relevant factors (e.g., developmental indices, labeling, task repetition) is required for scale error research, this study sheds light on the relevance of verb vocabulary on scale errors.

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BACKGROUND: Associations between lexical processing and lexical development during the second year of life have been little studied in preterm children. AIMS: To evaluate associations between lexical processing at 18 months and lexical development between 12 and 18 months in very preterm children. STUDY DESIGN: Correlational study. SUBJECTS: 25 Finnish-speaking children born <32 gestational weeks. OUTCOME MEASURES: Lexical processing (reaction time RT; correct looking time CLT) was measured with an eye tracking technology-based task at 18 months' corrected age. Lexical development was measured longitudinally at 12-, 15- and 18-months' corrected age using the following screening instruments: the short form version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scale: Infant-Toddler Checklist. RESULTS: The longer the RT of the child, the weaker expressive skills the child had at 12 and 15 months (correlations coefficient values -0.45 to -0.51). The more the child looked at the target image compared to the distractor (CLT), the stronger expressive skills the child had at 18 months (r = 0.45-0.52). A linear regression model with RT and gender as independent variables explained 33 % of the variance in lexical skills at 18 months. A model with CLT explained 40 % of expressive skills at 18 months. CONCLUSIONS: Lexical processing at 18 months was associated with expressive lexical development in very preterm children. The results suggest eye tracking technology based methods may have utility in the assessment of early lexical growth in preterm children, although further research is needed to assess psychometric properties and predictive value of the method.

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Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a pseudohomophone) has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when children entertain a new meaning for a familiar word. One such factor is repetition of the new meaning (Storkel & Maekawa, 2005) and another is the acoustic differentiation of the two meanings (Conwell, 2017). This study asked 72 4-year-old English-learning children to assign novel meanings to familiar words and manipulated how many times they heard the words with their new referents as well as whether the productions were acoustically longer than typical productions of the words. Repetition supported the learning of a pseudohomophone, but acoustic differentiation did not.

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A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.

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AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: This study examines multiple associations between language domains in bilingual children with a focus on phonology. Previous studies indicate within- but not cross-language associations between vocabulary and grammar in bilingual children. We investigate whether the relation between phonology and other language domains differs from the one reported between vocabulary and grammar. METHODOLOGY: Canadian French-English bilingual children (n = 31), aged 31 months, participated in 2 free-play sessions, from which lexical, grammatical and phonological information was extracted. The children's parents completed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories and its Canadian French adaptation providing additional information on vocabulary and grammar in each of the children's languages. They also completed a questionnaire on their children's exposure to French and English. DATA ANALYSIS: Within and cross-language relations between phonology, vocabulary and grammar were investigated using correlational analyses and mixed logistic regression. FINDINGS: Correlational analyses did not reveal significant cross-language relations between phonology, vocabulary and grammar. However, mixed logistic regression, which controlled for language exposure effects, indicated that phonology was influenced by vocabulary and grammar both within and across languages. ORIGINALITY: This study is one of the first to study cross-domain relations involving phonology in young bilingual children. IMPLICATIONS: Overall, the findings suggest that phonology displays a pattern of relations that is different from other language domains engendering between-language effects due to a language-general component.

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Children's fine motor skills (FMS) link to cognitive development, however, research on their involvement in language processing, also with adults, is scarce. Lexical items are processed differently depending on the degree of sensorimotor information inherent in the words' meanings, such as whether these imply a body-object interaction (BOI) or a body-part association (i.e., hand, arm, mouth, foot). Accordingly, three studies examined whether lexical processing was affected by FMS, BOIness, and body-part associations in children (study 1, n = 77) and adults (study 2, n = 80; study 3, n = 71). Analyses showed a differential link between FMS and lexical processing as a function of age. Whereas response latencies indicated that children's FMS were associated with "hand" words, adults' FMS linked to the broader concept of BOI. Findings have implications for shared activation theories positing that FMS support lexical processing.

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Cross-linguistic studies can provide information about general and language specific features of language development, but relatively few such studies are available in literature. The main aim of the present study was to investigate, from a cross-linguistic perspective, the roles of the internal factor of gender and external factors of birth order and parental education level on the development of language in 2-year-old children. We examined 351 children growing up in three European language contexts: Croatian (N = 104), Estonian (N = 141) and Finnish (N = 106). Information on lexical skills and word combination ability was collected using the short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and the influence of background factors on these aspects of language development was investigated. No significant differences were found in lexical skills or word combination ability among the three language groups. These aspects of language development varied significantly with gender, but not with external factors. Our findings suggest that internal factors may influence early language development more than external factors.

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Two word-learning experiments were conducted to investigate the understanding of negative sentences in 18- and 24-month-old children. In Experiment 1, after learning that bamoule means "penguin" and pirdaling means "cartwheeling," 18-month-olds (n = 48) increased their looking times when listening to negative sentences rendered false by their visual context ("Look! It is not a bamoule!" while watching a video showing a penguin cartwheeling); however, they did not change their looking behavior when negative sentences were rendered true by their context ("Look! It is not pirdaling!" while watching a penguin spinning). In Experiment 2, 24-month-olds (n = 48) were first exposed to a teaching phase in which they saw a new cartoon character on a television (e.g., a blue monster). Participants in the affirmative condition listened to sentences like "It's a bamoule!" and participants in the negative condition listened to sentences like "It's not a bamoule!." At test, all participants were asked to find the bamoule while viewing two images: the familiar character from the teaching phase versus a novel character (e.g., a red monster). Results showed that participants in the affirmative condition looked more to the familiar character (i.e., they learned the familiar character was a bamoule) than participants in the negative condition. Together, these studies provide the first evidence for the understanding of negative sentences during the second year of life. The ability to understand negative sentences so early might support language acquisition, providing infants with a tool to constrain the space of possibilities for word meanings.

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This study focuses on the multimodal communication of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. Eleven children with ASD (aged from 28 to 79 months) and 11 TD children (from 12 to 30 months) were matched by their productive vocabulary. We observed their communicative production in a semi-structured play situation. Results showed no differences in the combinations of gestural and vocal elements between children with ASD and TD. By contrast, regarding the production of the three-element multimodal combinations, we found a different pattern between ASD and TD children depending on their lexical development. These results provide clues to understand some controversial findings regarding multimodal production of people with ASD described in the literature.

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In laboratory settings children are able to learn new words from overheard interactions, yet in naturalistic contexts this is often not the case. We investigated the degree to which joint attention within the overheard interaction facilitates overheard learning. In the study, 20 2-year-olds were tested on novel words they had been exposed to in two different overhearing contexts: one in which both interlocutors were attending to the interaction and one in which one interlocutor was not attending. Participants learned the new words only in the former condition, indicating that they did not learn when joint attention was absent. This finding demonstrates that not all overheard interactions are equally good for word learning; attentive interlocutors are crucial when learning words through overhearing.

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