The federal Early Head Start (EHS) program began in 1995, and a randomized trial was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of 17 EHS programs. In all, 3,001 low-income families (35% African American, 24% Hispanic, and 37% White) with a pregnant women or an infant under the age of 12 months were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group (with…

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 crystallized the concern for accountability in education. National testing was mandated as a way to improve the "broken" educational system. Publicly funded early education programs were not spared from such testing. While the positive effects of high-quality early education on children's later school…

Studied partner and site novelty for mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions. Found that adult-infant vocal timing measures at age 4 months did predict attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions suggested the dynamics of infants' early…

Suggests that children construe the world as they develop relationships with other individuals. Offers considerations regarding developmental changes marking the first year of life and argues that cognition is framed in public social exchanges and private dialogical thinking. (DLH)

Examined 2-year-olds' language acquisition with an emphasis on the agency and intentionality of the child. Concluded that development depends on the child's expression of intentionality by actions (performance), the essential tension between the child's engagement and effort, and the integration of linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects of the…

Finds Bloom and Tinker's description and measurement of active, integrated, and situated children to be a credible scientifically rigorous paradigm for language acquisition research. Highlights their use of the naturalistic, observational method to understand the changing patterns of integration and use of multifaceted abilities in child language…

Presents emergentist coalition theory of language development characterizing lexical acquisition as the emergent product of cognitive constraints, social-pragmatic factors, and global attentional mechanisms. Details 12 experiments with 12- to 25-month-olds using the development of reference as test case of the theory. Presents evidence that…

Describes the richness of Hollich et al.'s model of language acquisition. Presents concerns about focus on object words in word learning research, the phantom child in the model, and the missing affect in theories and research on word learning. Suggests that experimental work inspired by principles and constraints theory and observational work…

Examined data from 408 pairs of identical, same-sex fraternal twins at 14, 20, and 24 months to assess cognitive development and to identify genetic and environmental influences on phenotypic similarity. Found various patterns of development for separate constructs, for females versus males on each construct, and for individuals across constructs.…

Notes two faulty aspects of the Reznick et al., twin study (PS 526 688): the expressive language measure at 14 months, which has practically no spread of item difficulty, as well as measures included to assess specific cognitive characteristics; and the notion of infant transition as it affects interpretation of the results. (HTH)

This study examined the development of causal expressions in children's discourse from two to three years of age. Linguistic, contextual, and pragmatic influences on language development were the major factors considered. (CM)

Presents a model which details the ways in which children in different language communities acquire the morphophonological structure of their language. (JMB)

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

Concerns the language development of four children between the ages of 19 and 26 months, as they progressed from single-word utterances to a mean length of utterance of 2.5 morphemes. The observed developmental sequence is described and possible linguistic and cognitive explanations for it are discussed.