Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2019 IACC Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by the…

Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

Maternal sensitivity during an observed mother-child clean-up task at 18 months and maternal sensitivity during an observed mother-child free-play task at 18 months were tested as independent predictors of child internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, social competence, and language development at 24 months. Participants (n = 292 mothers)…

Purpose: Systematic reviews of bilingual children's reading development are very limited, and none of which solely focus on predictors of reading difficulties among those with developmental language disorder (DLD). The present scoping review fills an important need by analyzing the recent research literature on the reading outcomes of bilingual…

While previous research has shown that language use in the home is an important factor in bilingual language development, little research has focused on how specific language strategies used by parents relate to bilingual children's language exposure and vocabulary development. Yet, for parents, this information has the potential to inform their…

Sight translation has been widely used in aptitude testing to screen prospective trainee interpreters at leading interpreter training schools, including ESIT, ISIT, and EMCI. However, it has also been criticised for its lack of validity and reliability. No empirical study has thus far been conducted to explore its power to predict interpreting…

Chinese-English dual language learners (Chinese DLLs) are a growing population in the US. Existing studies of preschool-aged Chinese DLLs mostly focused on single-word vocabulary and rarely explored other skills important for school readiness. In the current study, we examined Chinese DLLs' development of receptive vocabulary and comprehension of…

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans were obtained from 19 infants at 7 months. Expressive and receptive language performance was assessed at 12 months. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) identified brain regions where gray-matter and white-matter concentrations at 7 months correlated significantly with children's language scores at 12 months.…

The quality of a child's early language and communication environment (ELCE) is an important predictor of later educational outcomes. However, less is known about the routes via which these early experiences influence the skills that support academic achievement. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (n = 7,120) we…

Joint attention and imitation are thought to facilitate a developmental cascade of language and social communication skills. Delays in developing these skills may affect the quality of children's social interactions and subsequent language development. We examined how responding to joint attention and object imitation skills predicted rate of…

One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested…

Engagement is seen as a highly desirable outcome and process contributing to successful learning. In second language acquisition (SLA), we know comparatively little about the nature of engagement for learning a language, in particular the kind of individual differences in learners that account for variations in engagement. In this study, we…

In this study, infant vocabulary development was tracked in a multilingual society (Singapore) within a socioeconomically diverse sample. The sample comprised 1316 infants from 17.4 to 27.7 months (669 females, 647 males; 88% Chinese race, 4% Malay, 4% Indian, and 0.004% mixed-race [4% declined to provide race information]). Children varied in…

To prepare students for an increasingly globalized world, intercultural group work (IGW) holds promise as a pedagogical tool, because it may help them develop intercultural competence and second-language proficiency. These skills also are needed to complete the discipline-specific aspects of group work successfully. This study investigates the…

Background: Evidence shows that the relation with the referent (object manipulation, contact/no contact pointing) and the different hand features (index finger/open palm) when pointing indicate different levels of cognitive and linguistic attainment in typical development (TD). This evidences the close link between pointing, cognition and language…