Language Development

The word infant is derived from the Latin word infans, which means literally "unable to speak". Consequently, the acquisition of speech is often regarded as marking the end of infancy. However, deciding precisely when speech has appeared (and hence, when infancy has ended) is not an easy matter. This is because the early development of language takes place very gradually. Thus, during the months which follow the production of the first word, the infant might learn to produce only one, two or three new words per month (Benedict, 1979; Nelson, 1973). Consequently, during these early months of language development, the infant still relies much more heavily upon cries, actions, and gestures rather than  speech for the purposes  of communication (Lock, 1978,1980; Lock, Service, Brito, & Chandler, Chapter 10, this volume; Schaffer, 1977, Chapter 8, this volume; Zinober & Martlew, 1985a, 1985b). And even after the infant has come to rely upon words as a major medium of communication, that infant might still not be able to combine words together to form simple two-word utterances with any degree of regularity until several more months have passed (Bloom, 1973; Garman, 1979).
The present chapter describes these various linguistic developments which gradually draw the period of infancy to a close. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part considers the first words which infants acquire, whereas the second part describes the subsequent linguistic developments that occur during the period of single-word speech. The third part considers how infants make the final transition into the multi-word speech of early childhood.

Parents of 28 children and a young adult with CHARGE syndrome participated in a survey on factors related to communication development. Information was obtained using a questionnaire and a follow-up interview. Parents were asked to (1) specify their child's primary mode of communication, (2) judge the significance of the effects of physical disorders, sensory deficits, and behavior on development and communication, (3) provide lists of their child's conditions and disorders, and (4) provide information about intervention related to communication and education. Thirtynine percent of the participants (11/28) did not use symbolic language to communicate. The results suggest that factors affecting the majority of participants-physical disorders, vision loss, and hearing loss-may adversely affect communication ability. However, these factors did not preclude the development of symbolic language. Factors that were related to the development of symbolic language were success in the treatment of hearing loss with amplification, the ability to walk independently, and communication training initiated by 3 years of age. Other factors that may be related to the development of symbolic language are also discussed. ß 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

10. DC cultures were generated as described (5, 22). Immature I-A kϩ DCs grown from C3H/HeN, C3H/HeJ, and CBA/J (Jackson Labs, Bar Harbor, ME) marrow suspensions were pulsed with HEL (1 to 3 mg/ml) with or without LPS (1 to 10 ng/ml, E. coli 0111.B4) for 1 to 3 hours, washed, and chased in HEL-and LPS-free media. Similar results were obtained with DCs from each strain. DC cultures contained supernatant from mGM-CSFexpressing J558L cells (from A. Lanzavecchia, Basel Institute, Basel, Switzerland). LPS was removed from HEL (Sigma) with Kuttsuclean adsorbent (Maruha Corporation, Ibaraki, Japan). Maturation stimuli included LPS, CD40L, tumor necrosis factor-␣, or replating (22). 11. DCs were fixed with 4% (wt/vol) paraformaldehyde and washed in phosphate-buffered saline. Cells were incubated with monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) on ice as described (23). The rat mAb C4H3 was provided by R. Germain (NIH, Bethesda, MD). C4H3 was purified on protein A-Sepharose and biotinylated. Cells were labeled with biotin-conjugated mAbs (Pharmingen) to I-E k (14-4-4S) or I-A k (10-2.16) and fluorescein

proposed that cognitive theories be developed in an effort to satisfy multiple criteria and to avoid theoretical myopia. He provided two overlapping lists of 13 criteria that the human cognitive architecture would have to satisfy in order to be functional. We have distilled these into 12 criteria: flexible behavior, real-time performance, adaptive behavior, vast knowledge base, dynamic behavior, knowledge integration, natural language, learning, development, evolution, and brain realization. There would be greater theoretical progress if we evaluated theories by a broad set of criteria such as these and attended to the weaknesses such evaluations revealed. To illustrate how theories can be evaluated we apply these criteria to both classical connectionism Rumelhart & McClelland 1986b) and the ACT-R theory (Anderson & Lebiere 1998). The strengths of classical connectionism on this test derive from its intense effort in addressing empirical phenomena in such domains as language and cognitive development. Its weaknesses derive from its failure to acknowledge a symbolic level to thought. In contrast, ACT-R includes both symbolic and subsymbolic components. The strengths of the ACT-R theory derive from its tight integration of the symbolic component with the subsymbolic component. Its weaknesses largely derive from its failure, as yet, to adequately engage in intensive analyses of issues related to certain criteria on Newell's list.

Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and teachers in all subject areas are faced with new challenges in enabling learners' academic language development without losing focus on content. These challenges require new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between language and content as well as new pedagogies that incorporate a dual focus on language and content in subject matter instruction. This article describes three professional development contexts in the U.S., where teachers have engaged in language analysis based on functional linguistics (for example, Halliday & Hasan, 1989;

In this study, it was postulated that typically developing (i.e., normally developing without incidence of a speech or language delay or disorder) Spanish/Englishspeaking children ages 4 to 5 years old would show different articulation productions and phonological patterns in both languages. Sixteen participants from Florida were tested with Spanish and English articulation and phonology tests. For articulation, two manner or

Recently, structural MRI studies in children have been used to examine relations between brain volume and behavioral measures. However, most of these studies have been done in children older than 2 years of age. Obtaining volumetric measures in infants is considerably more difficult, as structures are less well defined and largely unmyelinated, making segmentation challenging. Moreover, it is still unclear whether individual anatomic variation across development, in healthy, normally developing infants, is reflected in the configuration and function of the mature brain and, as importantly, whether variation in infant brain structure might be related to later cognitive and linguistic abilities. In this longitudinal study, using T1 structural MRI, we identified links between amygdala volume in normally developing, naturally sleeping, 6-month infants and their subsequent language abilities at 2, 3 and 4 years. The images were processed and manually segmented using Cardviews to extract volumetric measures. Intra-rater reliability for repeated segmentation was 87.73% of common voxel agreement. Standardized language assessments were administered at 6 and 12 months and at 2, 3 and 4 years. Significant and consistent correlations were found between amygdala size and language abilities. Children with larger right amygdalae at 6 months had lower scores on expressive and receptive language measures at 2, 3, and 4 years. Associations between amygdala size and language outcomes have been reported in children with autism. The findings presented here extend this association to normally developing children, supporting the idea that the amygdalae might play an important but as yet unspecified role in mediating language acquisition.

Every year, 10 000 infants are born in the United States with sensorineural deafness. Deaf children of hearing (and nonsigning) parents are unique among all children in the world in that they cannot easily or naturally learn the language that their parents speak. These parents face tough choices. Should they seek a cochlear implant for their child? If so, should they also learn to sign? As pediatricians, we need to help parents understand the risks and benefits of different approaches to parent-child communication when the child is deaf. The benefits of learning sign language clearly outweigh the risks. For parents and families who are willing and able, this approach seems clearly preferable to an approach that focuses solely on oral communication.

The relationship between early maternal responsivity and later child communication outcomes in young children with fragile X syndrome was investigated. Data were obtained from 55 mother–child dyads over a 36-month period. Performance data were obtained at each measurement point from video observations of four different contexts. These were coded for (a) child communication behaviors, (b) parent responsivity, and (c) behavior management behaviors. Results indicate that early maternal responsivity predicts the level of four important child language outcomes at 36 months of age after controlling for child developmental level and autism symptomology.

Purpose: To present a brief report on the initial results of the application of Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, second edition, in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children. Methods: The study included 300 children with typical language development, from both genders, aged from 3 to 5 years and 11 months, as proposed by the original test version. After translation, back-translation, and adaptation of the second edition of the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, the instrument was administered to investigate the receptive and expressive language skills. Results: There was a significant difference between the average gross scores of the three groups for both "receptive" and "expressive" language skills, and a growing tendency of scores according to age. Conclusion: After analysis, we found that versions translated and adapted for Brazilian Portuguese speakers allow one to evaluate and discriminate the performance of children in receptive and expressive language skills, according to age group, as well as the original version. RESUMO Objetivo: Apresentar um breve relato com os primeiros resultados da aplicação do Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, segunda edição, em falantes do Português Brasileiro (PB). Métodos: Participaram deste estudo 300 crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem, de ambos os gêneros, entre as faixas etárias de 3 a 5 anos e 11 meses, conforme propõe a versão original do teste. Após a tradução, a retrotradução e a adaptação da segunda edição do Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, foi realizada a aplicação para investigar as habilidades receptivas e expressivas da linguagem. Resultados: Observou-se diferença significante entre as médias dos escores brutos dos três grupos tanto para a habilidade de linguagem "receptiva" quanto "expressiva", e tendência crescente dos escores em função da idade. Conclusão: Após análise, verificamos que a versão traduzida e adaptada para o PB permite avaliar e discriminar o desempenho de crianças em habilidades receptivas e expressivas da linguagem, segundo a faixa etária, assim como em sua versão original.

Aim and background: Working memory has an important role in language acquisition and development of cognition skills. The ability of encoding, storage and retrieval of phonological codes, as activities of working memory, acquired by audition sense. Children with cochlear implant experience a period that they are not able to perceive sounds. In order to assess the effect of hearing on working memory, we investigated working memory as a cognition skill in children with normal development and cochlear implant. Methods: Fifty students with normal hearing and 50 students with cochlear implant aged 5-7 years participated in this study. Children educated in the preschool, the first and second grades. Children with normal development were matched based on age, gender, and grade of education with cochlear implant. Two components of working memory including phonological loop and central executive were compared between two groups. Phonological loop assessed by nonword repetition task and forward digit span. To assess central executive component backward digit span was used. The developmental trend was studied in children with normal development and cochlear implant as well. The effect of age at implantation in children with cochlear implants on components of working memory was investigated. Results: There are significant differences between children with normal development and cochlear implant in all tasks that assess working memory (p < 0.001). The children's age at implantation was negatively correlated with all tasks (p < 0.001). In contrast, duration of usage of cochlear implant set was positively correlated with all tasks (p < 0.001). The comparison of working memory between different grades showed significant differences both in children with normal development and in children with cochlear implant (p < 0.05). Conclusion: These results implied that children with cochlear implant may experience difficulties in working memory. Therefore, these children have problems in encoding, practicing, and repeating phonological units. The results also suggested working memory develops when the child grows up. In cochlear implant children, with decreasing age at implantation and increasing their experience in perceiving sound, working memory skills improved.

Little is known about how AAC use in preschool may impact language development for children with complex communication needs (e.g., children with autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and other developmental disabilities). We developed two surveys (a) to describe children ' s use of AAC in preschool classrooms, as well as the use of prompts and question asking, and augmented input by their communication partners; and (b) to describe teachers ' experience, training, and perceived support in providing AAC. We then examined the relationship between children ' s experience of AAC, including the use of prompts, question asking, and augmented input by their partners, and the growth of receptive and expressive language for 71 children with developmental disabilities over a two-year period. The use of AAC by peers to provide augmented input was associated with stronger language growth; the use of prompting and question asking by teachers was associated with weaker language growth. Teachers reported that they received little training regarding ways to support a child ' s use of AAC. Results suggest the need for further research on promoting AAC use at the preschool level, including research to promote peer interactions for AAC users.

Children with developmental disabilities often converse less frequently than their developmentally matched peers. This low conversational participation can cause problems for the children’s future language and discourse development. The purpose of this experimental study was to test the hypothesis that adult topic-continuing wh-questions would elicit topic continuations in children with relatively low language ability, but not in children with relatively high language ability. Twenty-three children with developmental delays interacted with an adult who conducted two play sessions. In each session, the adult used a different interaction style. The two styles differed in the adult’s use of topic-continuing wh-questions. Results indicate that adult use of topic-continuing wh-questions supported the use of child continuations in children at all language levels. The type of continuations (single word versus multiword) that were elicited depended on the language level of the children. Cli...

Background. Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis is an acute, inflammatory-demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system usually with monophasic course and a favourable neurological outcome. Longterm neurocognitive sequelae and quality of life have not been fully investigated yet.

Current individual-based, process-oriented approaches (dynamic systems theory and the microgenetic perspective) have led to an increase of variability-centred studies in the literature. The aim of this article is to propose a technique that incorporates variability in the analysis of the shape of developmental change. This approach is illustrated by the analysis of time serial language data, in particular data on the development of preposition use, collected from four participants. Visual inspection suggests that the development of prepositions-in-contexts shows a characteristic pattern of two phases, corresponding with a discontinuity. Three criteria for testing such discontinuous phase-wise change in individual data are presented and applied to the data. These are: (1) the sub-pattern criterion, (2) the peak criterion and (3) the membership criterion. The analyses rely on bootstrap and resampling procedures based on various null hypotheses. The results show that there are some indications of discontinuity in all participants, although clear inter-individual differences have been found, depending on the criteria used. In the discussion we will address several fundamental issues concerning (dis)continuity and variability in individual-based, process-oriented data sets.

We examined the effects of receptive speech on the acquisition of manual signing among three mentally retarded children. In an alternating treatments design, we compared the acquisition of expressive signs that were, versus were not, in a child's receptive vocabulary. The children were trained via total communication in which pictorial referents were named during sign training. Signs corresponding to known words were generally acquired faster and retained better than signs corresponding to unknown words. We conducted posttests to assess the stimulus control of signing and any changes in expressive and receptive signing and speech. Observed changes in performance could be accounted for by attention to aspects of the stimulus complex during training and functional equivalence of stimuli established by training.

Forty five patients (23 boys and 22 girls) with elective mutism (8.7 ± 3.6 years old), who were referred to a university department and a child guidance clinic within a 15-year-period, were followed up on average 12 years later. For 41 of them, sufficient information could be obtained at follow-up, and 31 patients could be investigated personally. At follow-up, an interview and a standardized psychopathological examination were carried out as well as two standardized biographic inventories. The main results were: 1) a high load of individual and family psychopathology was characteristic of the patients. The disorder started already at age 3 to 4 and referral age was 8 years on average. 2) In 16 out of 41 patients (39 %), a complete remission could be observed. All other patients still revealed some communication problems. 3) The formerly mute patients described themselves as less independent, less motivated with regard to school achievement, less self-confident and less mature and healthy in comparison to a normal reference group. 4) A poor outcome could be best predicted by the variable "mutism within the core family"at the time of referral.

In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning.

A group of five preschool children with developmental disability and their mothers participated in a study into the efficacy of a parent-implemented language intervention. Each parent was included in the team as a consultee, with a speech pathologist and special educator acting as consultants within a collaborative consultation process. Treatment for each child was developed using this process, with specific strategies to increase language production skills decided by the team. Strategies were used within an interactive model of early language intervention. The effectiveness of treatment was determined within a multiple baseline design. For three children, the impact of treatment was evident, but the results were not replicated for the other two children. Descriptive analysis of mothers&#39; communicative behaviours indicated that, following treatment, they tended to direct more utterances to their children, used more models, fewer questions and directives, and more (although limite...

There has been general consensus that initial word learning during early infancy is a slow and time-consuming process that requires very frequent exposure, whereas later in development, infants are able to quickly learn a novel word for a novel meaning. From the perspective of memory maturation, this shift in behavioral development might represent a shift from slow procedural to fast declarative memory formation. Alternatively, it might be caused by the maturation of specific brain structures within the declarative memory system that may support lexical mapping from the very first. Here, we used the neurophysiological method of ERPs to watch the brain activity of 6-month-old infants, when repeatedly presented with object–word pairs in a cross-modal learning paradigm. We report first evidence that infants as young as 6 months are able to associate objects and words after only very few exposures. A memory test 1 day later showed that infants did not fully forget this newly acquired kn...

Background: Postpartum anxiety and depression has detrimental effects on the overall mental development of children. This study aims to assess the impact of postpartum anxiety and depression on children's mental development on all sub-scales in a Pakistani population.

Background: The capacity to memorize speech sounds is crucial for language acquisition. Newborn human infants can discriminate phonetic contrasts and extract rhythm, prosodic information, and simple regularities from speech. Yet, there is scarce evidence that infants can recognize common words from the surrounding language before four months of age.

The present study explored how children’s prephonological writing foretells differential learning outcomes in primary school. The authors asked Portuguese-speaking preschool children in Brazil (mean age 4 year 3 months) to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to identify the 31 children whose writing was not based on spellings or sounds of the target words. Two and a half years later, the children took a standardized spelling test. The more closely the digram (two-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool task correlated with those in children’s books, the better scores the children had in primary school, and the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores. Thus, preschoolers whose prephonological writing revealed attentiveness to the statistical properties of text subsequently performed better in conventional spelling. These analytic techniques may help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.

Since 1990 the DRA Speech Research Unit has conducted research into applications of speech recognition technology to speech and language development for young children. This has been done in collaboration wirh Hereford and Worcester County Council Education ...

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that implicit and explicit phonological representations of Chinese-speaking children undergo restructuring with reading experience. Implicit representations refer to those that are automatically handled by the language module; explicit representations refer to those that are explicit control units in speech manipulation. Experiment I studied the restructuring process among a group of pre-schoolers who had little knowledge of printed words when they were first tested. Experiment II studied a group of novice readers from the beginning of the first grade until the end of the third grade. The results revealed that children's memory errors contained more errors in transposing subsyllabic units available in the stimulus strings than errors in misordering entire syllables. The proportion of transposition errors increased significantly from the preschool age to the first grade and was related to the rapid increase in the children's ability to read Zhuyin fuhao. The developmental sequence of explicit representations parallels that of implicit representations in that pre-schoolers could not cope with the phonological awareness task at the subsyllabic level at a time before they could demonstrate any ability in reading whereas first-grade children demonstrated fundamental control over the task. Children's performances on phonological awareness were related to Zhuyin fuhao reading ability at the last testing session of the preschool age and continued to be evident till the third grade. Though parallel in developmental sequence, there was no evidence that the development of explicit representations depended on the development of implicit representations. The * This research was supported by grants from the National Science Council in Taiwan. The author thanks the people and the institutions that helped locate the children, the parents who gave their consent, and the children who participated in the study.

A common theory of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom onset includes toddlers who do not display symptoms until well after age 2, which are termed late-onset ASD cases. Objectives were to analyze differences in clinical phenotype between toddlers identified as ASD at initial evaluations (early diagnosed) versus those initially considered nonspectrum, then later identified as ASD (late diagnosed). Two hundred seventy-three toddlers recruited from the general population based on a failed developmental screening form or parent or physician concerns were followed longitudinally from 12 months and identified as early- and late-diagnosed cases of ASD, language delayed, or typically developing. Toddlers completed common standardized assessments and experimental eye-tracking and observational measures every 9–12 months until age 3. Longitudinal performance on standardized assessments and experimental tests from initial evaluations were compared. Delay in social communication skills was ...

Autism symptoms, including impairments in language development, social interactions, and motor skills, have been difficult to model in rodents. Since children exposed in utero to sodium valproate (VPA) demonstrate behavioral and neuroanatomical abnormalities similar to those seen in autism, the neurodevelopmental effects of this antiepileptic agent were examined in mice following its pre-or postnatal administration. Exposed pups were evaluated in a battery of neurodevelopmental procedures designed to assess VPA-induced retardation (wherein a behavior fails to mature on schedule), regression (wherein a behavior does mature on time but then deteriorates), or intrusions (wherein normal behaviors are overshadowed by stereotypic or self-injurious behaviors). The resulting observations were interpreted in the context of this new strategy to model autism.

Verbal fluency was operationalized as the number of words produced in a restricted category (i.e., semantic category [SCF] and words beginning with a given letter [ILF]) in 60 seconds. Word production in the first 15 seconds of either type of fluency task was defined as a measure of automatic information processing, whereas word production in the remaining 45 seconds (in 15-second periods) was taken as a measure of controlled information processing. Data revealed that over 60 seconds healthy children aged 8.4-9.7 years (n = 91) produced significantly more words and less incorrect responses on the SCF task than on the ILF task. Although word production was a function of both type of task and time, it was highest in the initial time slice of either type of fluency and decreased as time on task increased. Finally, no sex differences were found for any measure of performance on either type of fluency task. In contrast, the level of occupational achievement of the caregiver (LOA) appeared to be a determinant of the child's performance on either type of fluency task, indicating that LOA affects higher-order processes, such as the automation of newly learned verbal skills and effortful processing.

Lexical-semantic ability was investigated among children aged 6-9 years with cochlear implants (CI) and compared to clinical groups of children with language impairment (LI) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as to age-matched children with normal hearing (NH). In addition, the influence of age at implantation on lexical-semantic ability was investigated among children with CI. 97 children divided into four groups participated, CI (n=34), LI (n=12), ASD (n=12), and NH (n=39). A battery of tests, including picture naming, receptive vocabulary and knowledge of semantic features, was used for assessment. A semantic response analysis of the erroneous responses on the picture-naming test was also performed. The group of children with CI exhibited a naming ability comparable to that of the age-matched children with NH, and they also possessed a relevant semantic knowledge of certain words that they were unable to name correctly. Children with CI had a significantly better understa...

Among 30 Hong Kong Chinese fourth graders, sensitivities to character and word constructions were examined in judgment tasks at each level. There were three conditions across both tasks: the real condition, consisting of either actual two-character compound Chinese words or real Chinese compound characters; the reversed condition, with either the order of the two morphemes in the word or the order of the semantic and phonetic radicals in the character reversed; and the random condition, with either two morphemes randomly combined to create arbitrary nonwords or a semantic radical and a phonetic radical randomly combined using correct orthographic rules to create noncharacters. On the word level, children performed worst in the reversed condition and best with real words, whereas on the character level, children performed worst in the random condition and best in the reversed condition. Findings imply a holistic tendency toward word-level processing and an analytic approach to character-level processing in these Chinese children.

This study explored the developmental trends and phonetic category formation in bilingual children and adults. Participants included 30 fluent Spanish-English bilingual children, aged 8-11, and bilingual adults, aged 18-40. All completed gating tasks that incorporated code-mixed Spanish-English stimuli. There were significant differences in performance according to phonotactic construction of the stimuli, with fastest word recognition on words with voiceless initial consonants. Analysis of developmental trends revealed significant differences in children's performance by grade level and fastest recognition on English voiceless initial consonants than Spanish voiceless initial consonants. Differences in voice onset time between English and Spanish may have contributed to quicker recognition of English voiceless consonants than Spanish voiceless consonants. It is also possible that increased exposure to both spoken and written English may account for faster recognition of English voiceless words than Spanish voiceless words. In conclusion, multiple factors may influence perception of a second language.

Statistically, women, particularly pregnant women and new mothers, are at heightened risk for depression. The present review describes the current state of the research linking maternal depressed mood and children's cognitive and language development. Exposure to maternal depressive symptoms, whether during the prenatal period, postpartum period, or chronically, has been found to increase children's risk for later cognitive and language difficulties. The present review considers both the timing of maternal depression and the chronicity of mothers' depression on children's risk for cognitive and language delays. Infancy is frequently identified as a sensitive period in which environmental stimulation has the potential to substantially influence children's cognitive and language development. However, children's exposure to chronic maternal depression seems to be associated with more problematic outcomes for children, perhaps because depression interferes with mothers' ability to respond sensitively and consistently over time. Consistent with this expectation, interventions targeting parenting practices of depressed mothers have been found to increase children's cognitive competence during early childhood. The current review provides a synthesis of the current state of the field regarding the association between maternal depression and children's cognitive and language development during early childhood.

Objective To test the association of media exposure with language development in children under age 2 years. Study design A total of 1008 parents of children age 2 to 24 months, identified by birth certificates, were surveyed by telephone in February 2006. Questions were asked about child and parent demographics, child-parent interactions, and child's viewing of several content types of television and DVDs/videos. Parents were also asked to complete the short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). The associations between normed CDI scores and media exposure were evaluated using multivariate regression, controlling for parent and child demographics and parent-child interactions.

OBJECTIVE: To test the independent association of adult language input, television viewing, and adult-child conversations on language acquisition among infants and toddlers. METHODS: Two hundred seventy-five families of children aged 2 to 48 months who were representative of the US census were enrolled in a cross-sectional study of the home language environment and child language development (phase 1). Of these, a representative sample of 71 families continued for a longitudinal assessment over 18 months (phase 2). In the cross-sectional sample, language development scores were regressed on adult word count, television viewing, and adult-child conversations, controlling for socioeconomic attributes. In the longitudinal sample, phase 2 language development scores were regressed on phase 1 language development, as well as phase 1 adult word count, television viewing, and adult-child conversations, controlling for socioeconomic attributes. RESULTS: In fully adjusted regressions, the ef...

SLI. Section 2 introduces key characteristics of SLI based on off-line studies, Section 3 presents the most important current accounts that have been put forward to explain the nature and cause of SLI, and Section 4 reviews studies on sentence processing in children with SLI. Section 5 discusses the relation between language acquisition and language processing and presents results from the German Language Development (GLAD) Project that provides evidence for a link between an early auditory delay and impaired processing of prosodic information and later language deficits in children with SLI. Section 6 pulls everything together by critically discussing the accounts presented in Section 3 in relation to the results from the sentence processing studies in Section 4 and the findings from the GLAD project in Section 5. 2. The phenotype of children with SLI based on off-line studies Children with SLI are a heterogeneous group of language impaired children. The heterogeneity results from the way they are classified. Their inclusion in this group is not based on the aetiology of the impairment, because this is still unknown, but on a mismatch in their language vs. other cognitive abilities. Children with a language impairment but performance within the norms in non-verbal cognitive tasks are classified as children with SLI. This includes children who differ very much from each other. Some have difficulties only in production, others only in comprehension, and others in both production and comprehension. The hallmark of SLI seems to be problems in the production and comprehension of morpho-syntax. These manifest themselves in different ways depending on the language the children are acquiring. For example, English children with SLI have more problems in the verbal domain (tense/agreement) (Rice and Wexler, 1996) compared to the nominal domain (articles, plural marking) (Bedore and Leonard, 1998); in their production they omit to a greater extend the regular past tense-ed morpheme, auxiliaries, copulas, and the 3rd person singulars morpheme compared to articles a/the and the noun plurals morpheme. In contrast, Greek children with SLI have difficulties in both the verbal and nominal domain. In the verbal domain, deficits have been reported in the production of subject-verb agreement and to a smaller extend in the production of past tense (Clahsen and Dalalakis, 1999; Mastropavlou, 2006; Smith, 2008). In the nominal domain, Greek children with SLI have persistent difficulties in the production of accusative and genitive clitic object pronouns, genitive marking on definite articles and to a smaller extend definite articles (

OBJECTIVE: Thirty-five percent of women of child-bearing age are obese, and there is evidence that maternal obesity may increase the risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcome. However, research regarding obesity and neurodevelopment among children born preterm is limited. This study aimed to determine associations between maternal obesity and neurodevelopment in very preterm children at age 2 years. STUDY DESIGN: Maternal/infant dyads (n = 62) born ⩽ 30 weeks gestation were enrolled in a prospective cohort study at a level-III neonatal intensive care unit. Mothers were classified as obese or non-obese based on pre-pregnancy body mass index. Infants underwent magnetic resonance imaging at term equivalent and developmental testing at age 2. Maternal obesity was investigated for associations with neurodevelopment. RESULT: Maternal obesity was associated with positive screen for autism (odds ratio = 9.88, P = 0.002) and lower composite language scores (β = − 9.36, (confidence interval = − 15.11, − 3.61), P = 0.002). CONCLUSION: Maternal obesity was associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcome at age 2 in this cohort of very preterm children. This study requires replication, but may support targeted surveillance of infants born to women with maternal obesity.

Serial assessments of cognitive and language development are recommended for very preterm children, but standardized neuropsychological testing is time-consuming and expensive, as well as tiring for the child.To validate the Italian version of the PARCA-R parent questionnaire and test its clinical effectiveness in assessing cognitive development of very preterm children at 2 years of corrected age.120 consecutive Italian very preterm children (mean gestational age 28.8 weeks, standard deviation 2.1) were assessed in four hospitals through the Mental Development Index (MDI) of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID-II). Parents completed the PARCA-R questionnaire, designed to measure children's non-verbal and verbal (vocabulary and sentence complexity) cognitive level. The correlation between the MDI and the PARCA-R Parent Report Composite (PRC) was tested through the Pearson correlation coefficient, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to identify optimal PRC cut-offs.Significant correlation between the PRC score and MDI (r = 0.60, p < 0.001) indicated good concurrent validity. The area under the ROC curve was 0.83, and the cut-off of 46 lead to 72.7% sensitivity and 77.1% specificity in identifying children with moderate/severe cognitive delay (MDI < 70). Negative predictive value was 96.6 (90.3–99.3). Screening through PARCA-R would reduce the number of children with MDI ≥ 70 undergoing BSID-II or equivalent standardized tool from 109 to 25.The Italian version of PARCA-R retains good discriminative power for identifying cognitive delay in 2-year very preterm children. It is well accepted by parents, and represents a valid and efficient alternative for developmental screening and outcome measurement.

What are the origins of the efficient language learning abilities that allow humans to acquire their mother tongue in just a few years very early in life? Although previous studies have identified different mechanisms underlying the acquisition of auditory and speech patterns in older infants and adults, the earliest sensitivities remain unexplored. To address this issue, we investigated the ability of newborns to learn simple repetition-based structures in two optical brain-imaging experiments. In the first experiment, 22 neonates listened to syllable sequences containing immediate repetitions (ABB; e.g., ''mubaba,'' ''penana''), intermixed with random control sequences (ABC; e.g., ''mubage,'' ''penaku''). We found increased responses to the repetition sequences in the temporal and left frontal areas, indicating that the newborn brain differentiated the two patterns. The repetition sequences evoked greater activation than the random sequences during the first few trials, suggesting the presence of an automatic perceptual mechanism to detect repetitions. In addition, over the subsequent trials, activation increased further in response to the repetition sequences but not in response to the random sequences, indicating that recognition of the ABB pattern was enhanced by repeated exposure. In the second experiment, in which nonadjacent repetitions (ABA; e.g., ''bamuba,'' ''napena'') were contrasted with the same random controls, no discrimination was observed. These findings suggest that newborns are sensitive to certain input configurations in the auditory domain, a perceptual ability that might facilitate later language development.