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...

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, ten pounds ca...

Prior research has shown that children hold a belief in causal determinism the belief that all events are caused – by 4 years of age. In this study we investigate the developmental origins of this belief. We showed toddlers (24 months) a spontaneous or explained novel physical outcome (a toy that lit up either spontaneously or upon contact from an experimenter) and then showed them an additiona...

OBJECTIVE To describe the conceptual foundation, development, and initial psychometric analyses of a new outcome measure of functional status in toddlers with limb deficiency. DESIGN Parents of children with limb deficiency completed self-report measures during a routine medical clinic visit. SETTING Outpatient orthopedic pediatric clinic. PARTICIPANTS Twenty parents (mothers) of children...

The literature on the importance of early identification and early intervention for children with developmental disabilities such as autism continues to grow. The increased prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders has fostered research efforts on the development and validation of autism-specific screening instruments for use with young children. There are currently several such autism-specific...

Using a preferential looking paradigm, the current study examined the role that grammatical gender plays when preschool French-speaking toddlers process role nouns in the masculine form (e.g., chanteurs masculine 'singers'). While being auditorily prompted with "Look at the 'a role noun'!", two- and three-year-olds were presented with two pictures of two characters ('boy-boy' versus 'girl-boy')...

This paper presents a review of the literature designed to identify child behaviors that shape a profile of toddlers who should receive intervention. The review presents empirically documented predictors of language change and risk factors for language impairment. It examines research addressing the children having difficulty learning language and children developing typically. The argument pre...

By their second birthday, children are beginning to map meaning to form with relative ease. One challenge for these developing abilities is separating information relevant to word identity (i.e. phonemic information) from irrelevant information (e.g. voice and foreign accent). Nevertheless, little is known about toddlers’ abilities to ignore irrelevant phonetic detail when faced with the demand...

Recognizing similarity between one’s own and others’ actions is important for identifying others with whom to affiliate and from whom to learn. In this study, 40 19-month-old toddlers recognized when a puppet chose the same toys as them. Toddlers preferred to affiliate with a puppet who chose the same toys as themselves relative to a puppet who chose other toys and they modified their subsequen...

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs ...