UNASSIGNED: The consensus in scientific literature is that each child undergoes a unique linguistic development path, albeit with shared developmental stages. Some children excel or lag behind their peers in language skills. Consequently, a key challenge in language acquisition research is pinpointing factors influencing individual differences in language development.
UNASSIGNED: We observed children longitudinally from 3 to 24 months of life to explore early predictors of vocabulary size. Based on the productive vocabulary size of children at 24 months, 30 children met our sample selection criteria: 10 late talkers and 10 early talkers, and we compared them with 10 typical talkers. We evaluated interactive behaviors at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months, considering vocal production, gaze at mother\'s face, and gestural production during mother-child interactions, and we considered mothers\' report of children\'s actions and gestures and receptive-vocabulary size at 15 and 18 months.
UNASSIGNED: Results indicated early precursors of language outcome at 24 months identifiable as early as 3 months in vocal productions, 6 months for gaze at mother\'s face and 12 months for gestural productions.
UNASSIGNED: Our research highlights both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, identifying the early indicators of belonging to the group of late or early talkers underscores the significant role of this developmental period for future studies. On a practical note, our findings emphasize the crucial need for early investigations to identify predictors of vocabulary development before the typical age at which lexical delay is identified.

Objective: The aim of this study is to analyze the development of speech ability in Mandarin-speaking infants and children with normal hearing using MUSS and to provide a normal value control for the evaluation of speech ability in children with hearing loss. Methods: From September 2012 to January 2023, a total of 256 infants and children aged 1-60 months in Mandarin language environment participated in this study. 200 infants and children aged from 1 to 60 months were finally included, whose hearing was considered normal according to the history collection, high-risk registers for hearing loss and hearing screening. All infants and children were divided into 10 groups with 20 infants or children in each group. They were: 1 month, 2-3 months, 4-6 months, 7-9 months, 10-12 months, 13-18 months, 19-24 months, 25-36 months, 37-48 months, and 49-60 months. Using SPSS 19.0 software for data analysis, we calculated regression equations based on fitting curves. Results: The language ability of infants and children with normal hearing increased with age and reached ceiling at 56.5months.The regression equation was: score=-0.009 3×(age) 2+2.179×(age)+6.718 6, r2=0.85; age=0.003 9×(score) 2+0.148 4×(score)+2.708, r2=0.85. Conclusions: The speech ability of infants and children with normal hearing shows an increasing trend with age. Scores of different speech skills can be predicted according to their age. Age can also be predicted according to their scores of different speech skills.
目的： 采用有意义使用言语量表（Meaningful Use of Speech Scale，MUSS）测量使用普通话的听力正常婴幼儿和儿童的言语能力发育正常值，为听力损失患儿的言语能力评估提供正常值对照。 方法： 2012年9月至2023年1月共有256名月龄为1~60个月的北京地区普通话语言交流环境下的婴幼儿和学龄前儿童参与MUSS问卷调查，经过病史采集、耳聋高危因素排查和听力学检查，最终200名婴幼儿和儿童通过所有检查项，其问卷结果纳入统计分析，其中男105名，女95名。按照生理年龄将受试儿童分为10组（1月龄组、2~3月龄组、4~6月龄组、7~9月龄组、10~12月龄组、13~18月龄组、19~24月龄组、25~36月龄组、37~48月龄组和49~60月龄组），每组20人。采用SPSS19.0软件进行数据分析，根据拟合曲线计算回归方程。 结果： 听力正常婴幼儿和儿童的MUSS得分随月龄的增加而提高，在56.5月龄时达到满分。回归方程为：得分=-0.009 3×（月龄）2+2.179×（月龄）+6.718 6，r2=0.85；月龄=0.003 9×（得分）2+0.148 4×（得分）+2.708，r2=0.85。 结论： 普通话听力正常婴幼儿和学龄前儿童言语能力得分随月龄增加呈增长趋势，根据得分和月龄，分别可推断出言语能力发育年龄和与年龄相对应的言语能力得分，可为听力损失患儿言语发育情况的评估提供正常值对照。.

BACKGROUND: There is growing evidence that COVID-19 brought changes that immediately affected early language development. Little is known for how long these COVID-19 related changes shaped development. The current study systematically and longitudinally addressed this issue, following up children\'s language development throughout the first 2.5 years.
METHODS: The present study follows up on the sample from Frota et al. (2022), which demonstrated that 7-9-month-old infants born and raised during the pandemic do not segment words unlike pre-pandemic peers. Four studies were conducted: (1) word segmentation task at 12 months of age (Npandemic = 15); (2) word learning task at 20 months of age (Npandemic = 20); (3) language and communication development up to 30 months of age, via CDI and CSBS parental reports (Npandemic ranged 25-74); (4) overall development at 30 months of age using the Griffiths Developmental Scales (Npandemic = 16).
RESULTS: The pandemic sample consistently underperformed in all four studies in comparison to pre-pandemic data. There was no evidence of developed word segmentation abilities at 12 months of age, and no successful word learning at 20 months of age. Lexical development between 12 and 24 months of age was lower than in the pre-pandemic sample, while social communication did not seem to be affected. At 30 months of age, the pandemic sample showed lower scores and lower mental age on the Language and Communication Griffiths\' subscale, in comparison to the pre-pandemic data.
CONCLUSIONS: Infants born and raised during the pandemic have a poorer language development, that persists at least until 30 months of age.

Early language development is characterized by large individual variation. Several factors were proposed to contribute to individual pathways of language acquisition in infancy and childhood. One of the biologically based explaining factors is temperament, however, the exact contributions and the timing of the effects merits further research. Pre-term status, infant sex, and environmental factors such as maternal education and maternal language are also involved. Our study aimed to investigate the longitudinal relationship between infant temperament and early language development, also considering infant gender, gestational age, and birthweight. Early temperament was assessed at 6, 9, 18, 24, and 30 months with the Very Short Form of Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ-R) and the Very Short Form of Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ). Early nonverbal communication skills, receptive and expressive vocabulary were evaluated with the Hungarian version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (HCDI). Our study adds further evidence to the contribution of infant temperament to early language development. Temperament, infant gender, and gestational age were associated with language development in infancy. Infants and toddlers with higher Surgency might enter communicative situations more readily and show more engagement with adult social partners, which is favorable for communication development. Gestational age was previously identified as a predictor for language in preterm infants. Our results extend this association to the later and narrower gestational age time window of term deliveries. Infants born after longer gestation develop better expressive vocabulary in toddlerhood. Gestational age may mark prenatal developmental processes that may exert influence on the development of verbal communication at later ages.

BACKGROUND: Language delay affects near- and long-term social communication and learning in toddlers, and, an increasing number of experts pay attention to it. The development of prosody discrimination is one of the earliest stages of language development in which key skills for later stages are mastered. Therefore, analyzing the relationship between brain discrimination of speech prosody and language abilities may provide an objective basis for the diagnosis and intervention of language delay.
METHODS: In this study, all cases(n = 241) were enrolled from a tertiary women\'s hospital, from 2021 to 2022. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess children\'s neural prosody discrimination abilities, and a Chinese communicative development inventory (CCDI) were used to evaluate their language abilities.
RESULTS: Ninety-eight full-term and 108 preterm toddlers were included in the final analysis in phase I and II studies, respectively. The total CCDI screening abnormality rate was 9.2% for full-term and 34.3% for preterm toddlers. Full-term toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in all channels except channel 5, while preterm toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in channel 6 only. Multifactorial logistic regression analyses showed that prosody discrimination of the right angular gyrus (channel 3) had a statistically significant effect on language delay (odd ratio = 0.301, P < 0.05) in full-term toddlers. Random forest (RF) regression model presented that prosody discrimination reflected by channels and brain regions based on fNIRS data was an important parameter for predicting language delay in preterm toddlers, among which the prosody discrimination reflected by the right angular gyrus (channel 4) was the most important parameter. The area under the model Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.687.
CONCLUSIONS: Neural prosody discrimination ability is positively associated with language development, assessment of brain prosody discrimination abilities through fNIRS could be used as an objective indicator for early identification of children with language delay in the future clinical application.

Real-time attention coordination in parent-toddler dyads is often studied in tightly controlled laboratory settings. These studies have demonstrated the importance of joint attention in scaffolding the development of attention and the types of dyadic behaviors that support early language learning. Little is known about how often these behaviors occur in toddlers\' everyday lives. We brought wireless head-mounted eye trackers to families\' homes to study the moment-to-moment patterns of toddlers\' and parents\' visual attention and manual activity in daily routines. Our sample consisted of English- and Spanish-speaking families who all reported being middle- or upper middle-class. Toddlers were 2 to 3 years old. Consistent with the findings from previous laboratory studies, we found variability in how frequently toddlers attended to named objects in two everyday activities-Object Play and Mealtime. We then tested whether parent-toddler joint attention in the seconds before a naming utterance increased toddler\'s attention on the named object. We found that joint attention accompanied by the attended object being held increased the child\'s attention to the labeled object during naming. We posit that in the rich, noisy world of toddlers\' everyday lives, embodied attention plays a critical role in coordinating dyadic behaviors and creating informative naming moments. Our findings highlight the importance of studying toddlers\' natural behavior in the real world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

There is substantial evidence that children\'s apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as \"She play tennis\" and \"Mummy eating\" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such errors? In this study, we test the assumption that children\'s ability to recover from error is related to their developing sensitivity to longer-range dependencies. We use a pre-registered corpus analysis to explore the predictive value of different cues with regards to children\'s verb-marking errors and observe a developmental pattern consistent with this account. We look at context-independent cues (the identity of the specific verb being used) and at the relative value of context-dependent cues (the identity of the specific subject+verb sequence being used). We find that the only consistent effect across a group of 2- to 3-year-olds and a group of 3- to 4-year-olds is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject+verb sequences being used. The relative frequency of unmarked forms of the verb alone is predictive only in the younger age group. This is consistent with an account in which children recover from making errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to context, at first the immediately preceding lexical contexts (e.g., the subject that precedes the verb) and eventually more distant grammatical markers (e.g., the fronted auxiliary that precedes the subject in questions). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We provide a corpus analysis investigating input effects on young children\'s verb-marking errors (e.g., Mummy go) across development (between 2 and 4 years of age). We find evidence that these apparent errors of omission are in fact input-driven errors of commission that persist into the third year of life. We compare the relative effect on error rates of context-independent (e.g., verb) and context-dependent (e.g., subject+verb sequence) cues across developmental time. Our findings support the proposal that children recover from making verb-marking errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to preceding context.

BACKGROUND: Children with cleft palate, with or without cleft lip (CP±L), exhibit language delays on average compared to children without clefts. Interventions to address these disparities are scarce. In this multi-center study, Book Sharing for Toddlers with Clefts (BOOST), we will test a remote, parent-focused intervention to promote language development in children with CP±L.
OBJECTIVE: The study will test two primary hypotheses. First, toddlers randomized to BOOST will exhibit better language outcomes than children receiving standard-of-care (SOC). Second, we hypothesize that the BOOST program\'s effect on language outcomes is mediated by the frequency and quality of parent-child reading interactions.
METHODS: The study is a randomized-controlled trial comparing the BOOST group to a SOC comparison group. We will enroll N = 320 English and/or Spanish-speaking children ages 24-32 months with isolated CP±L (n = 160 per group). Both groups will receive children\'s books, and parents will record and upload videos of themselves reading the books with their children using a smartphone app developed for the study. Parents will also complete surveys asking whether they read to their children on five randomly selected days each week. In addition, the BOOST group will participate in 3 remote dialogic book-sharing intervention sessions via Zoom. We will code book-sharing videos to assess parents\' target skill usage and children\'s expressive language. End-of-study assessments will include measures of child language outcomes (e.g., clinician-administered measures, parent reports, and naturalistic child language samples).
RESULTS: Enrollment began in April 2024 and will continue through approximately April 2028.
CONCLUSIONS: The BOOST study will address a critical gap in the literature on interventions to improve language in children with CP±L. The results will inform the care for toddlers with oral clefts and have potential applications for other populations.

Connected speech processes (CSPs) occur randomly in everyday conversations of native speakers; however, such phonological variations can bring about challenges for non-native listeners. Looking at CSP literature, there seems to be very few studies that involved young foreign language learners. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the development of connected speech perception skills by focusing on 201 9- to 12-year-old Chinese EFL children. It also incorporated systematic error analysis to further probe into the specific perceptual difficulties. The results indicate that: (1) Despite a significantly ascending trend for the overall growth of perception skills, no significant differences were found between 11 and 12 year olds in elision and contraction, which suggests that the developmental trend varied depending on different CSP types; (2) Although random errors decreased with age, the number of lexicon and syntax errors gradually increased, and the distribution of perceptual errors shifted from the level of words and syllables to that of phonemes; (3) The primary types of errors resulting in the perception difficulties for elision and contraction were consonant errors, grammatical errors and morphology errors. Ergo, this study enhances the understanding of connected speech perception among EFL children and provides some implications for EFL/ESL listening instructions.

Auditory processing and procedural learning deficits have been associated with language learning difficulties. We investigated the relationship of these skills and school-age language abilities in children with and without a history of late talking using auditory event related potentials (ERPs). Late talking (i.e., slow early language development) increases the risk of persistent language difficulties, but its causes remain unknown. Participants in this study were children with varying language abilities (n = 60). Half of the participants (n = 30) had a history of late talking. We measured procedural learning by manipulating the predictability of sine tone stimuli in a passive auditory ERP paradigm. Auditory processing was tested by examining how the presence of noise (increasing perceptual demands) affected the ERPs. Contrary to our hypotheses on auditory processing and language development, the effect of noise on ERPs did not correlate with school-age language abilities in children with or without a history of late talking. Our paradigm failed to reveal interpretable effects of predictability leaving us unable to assess the effects of procedural learning. However, better language abilities were related to weaker responses in a 75-175 ms time window, and stronger responses in a 150-250 ms time window. We suggest that the weak early responses in children with better language ability reflect efficient processing of low-level auditory information, allowing deeper processing of later, high-level auditory information. We assume that these differences reflect variation in brain maturation between individuals with varying language abilities.