OBJECTIVE Permanent hearing impairment has a life-long impact on children and its early identification is important for language development. A newborn hearing screening (NHS) program has started in Okayama Prefecture, Japan, in 1999 to detect hearing impairment immediately after birth. We aim to examine the effect of this screening program on vocabulary development in pre-school children in a ...

The hypothesis was tested that children whose families differ in socioeconomic status (SES) differ in their rates of productive vocabulary development because they have different language-learning experiences. Naturalistic interaction between 33 high-SES and 30 mid-SES mothers and their 2-year-old children was recorded at 2 time points 10 weeks apart. Transcripts of these interactions provided ...

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social-pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children reveale...

This study investigates the predictive value of child-related and environmental characteristics for early lexical development. The German productive vocabulary of 51 2-year-olds (27 girls), assessed via parental report, was analyzed taking children's gender, the type of early care they experienced, and their mono- versus bilingual language composition into consideration. The children were from ...

In previous studies, we found that the social interactions infants experience in their everyday lives at 11- and 14-months of age affect language ability at 24 months of age. These studies investigated relationships between the speech style (i.e., parentese speech vs. standard speech) and social context [i.e., one-on-one (1:1) vs. group] of language input in infancy and later speech development...

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25- month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early lexical–grammatical relationships. Findings revealed that semant...

Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary. Yet in laboratory studies, even very young children can extend novel adjectives to new instances. Two studies examined the relation between children’s acquisition of adjectives and children’s emerging knowledge about nouns. In Study 1, the input parents provide to children when talkin...