Conversational topic maintenance and related cognitive abilities in autistic versus neurotypical children.

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how autistic and neurotypical children maintain a conversation topic.

Assessing a Video-Based Intervention to Promote Parent Communication Strategies with a Deaf Infant: A Feasibility and Acceptability Study.

Infant-parent interaction forms the foundation for language learning. For the majority of deaf infants, hearing loss can impact access to, and the quality of communicative interactions, placing language development at risk. Support for families to meet the challenges faced during interaction is highly variable in the United Kingdom.

The Role of Mealtimes in Fostering Language Development and Aligning Home and School Learning: Protocol for a Multi-Method Study of Preschool Children in Rural Kenya and Zambia.

Background: The association between school and home is fundamental to sustainable education: parents' understanding of the school's priorities and teachers' understanding of their pupils' home environment are both vital for children to remain in school and succeed academically. The relationship between parents and teachers is closest in preschool settings, providing a valuable opportunity to build bridges between home and school. In this protocol paper, we outline our planned methods for identifying beneficial home and school behaviors.

Qualitative Accounts of School-Aged Children's Diets during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Rural, Central, Kenya.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption to food security in many countries, including Kenya. However, the impact of this on food provision to children at an individual level is unknown. This small study aimed to provide a qualitative snapshot of the diets of children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Does Early Child Language Predict Internalizing Symptoms in Adolescence? An Investigation in Two Birth Cohorts Born 30 Years Apart.

Language is vital for social interaction, leading some to suggest early linguistic ability paves the way for good adolescent mental health. The relation between age-5 vocabulary and adolescent internalizing symptoms was examined in two U.K.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in Young People Leaving Care in England: A Study Profiling the Language, Literacy and Communication Abilities of Young People Transitioning from Care to Independence.

Research indicates children and young people in care have a high prevalence of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) as part of a complex set of vulnerabilities. This study describes the profile of language, literacy and communication abilities of a cohort of care leavers. The language, literacy and communication abilities of 44 young people leaving care between the ages of 16 and 26 years were assessed using standardized measures.

Pragmatics Development in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: A Call to Action.

Although major strides have been made in supporting the linguistic development of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, a high risk of pragmatic delay persists and often goes unrecognized. Pragmatic development (the growing sensitivity to one's communication partner when producing and comprehending language in context) is fundamental to children's social-cognitive development and to their well-being. We review the reasons why DHH children are vulnerable to pragmatic developmental challenges and the potential to create positive change.

Early Pragmatics in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Infants.

Background And Objectives: A set of important pragmatic skills emerge during infancy and pave the way for later language learning. It is thought these early social communication skills develop through infant-caregiver interaction. In a microanalysis, we tested whether deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) infants (typically at high risk of reduced access to rich communicative interaction in infancy) are less likely to engage in gestural and vocal pragmatic behaviors.

The Role of Executive Functions in Socioeconomic Attainment Gaps: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial.

The socioeconomic attainment gap in mathematics starts early and increases over time. This study aimed to examine why this gap exists. Four-year-olds from diverse backgrounds were randomly allocated to a brief intervention designed to improve executive functions (N = 87) or to an active control group (N = 88).

Can inferencing be trained in preschoolers using shared book-reading? A randomised controlled trial of parents' inference-eliciting questions on oral inferencing ability.

The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of a parent-delivered intervention intended to promote four-year-olds' oral inferencing skills during shared book-reading.

Infants' intentionally communicative vocalizations elicit responses from caregivers and are the best predictors of the transition to language: A longitudinal investigation of infants' vocalizations, gestures and word production.

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In study 1, 11 month olds (N = 134) were observed to coordinate vocalizations and gestures with gaze to their caregiver's face at above chance rates, indicating that they are plausibly intentionally communicative. Study 2 tested whether those infant communicative acts that were gaze-coordinated best predicted later expressive vocabulary.

The Understanding of Communicative Intentions in Children with Severe-to-Profound Hearing Loss.

The ability to distinguish lies from sincere false statements requires understanding a speaker's communicative intentions and is argued to develop through linguistic interaction. We tested whether this ability was delayed in 26 children with severe-to-profound hearing loss who, based on vocabulary size, were thought to have relatively limited access to linguistic exchanges compared to typically hearing peers (n = 93). Children were presented with toy bears who either lied or made a false statement sincerely.

Coral reef fishes exhibit beneficial phenotypes inside marine protected areas.

Human fishing effort is size-selective, preferentially removing the largest individuals from harvested stocks. Intensive, size-specific fishing mortality induces directional shifts in phenotypic frequencies towards the predominance of smaller and earlier-maturing individuals, which are among the primary causes of declining fish biomass. Fish that reproduce at smaller size and younger age produce fewer, smaller, and less viable larvae, severely reducing the reproductive capacity of harvested populations.

How children learn to produce appropriate referring expressions in narratives: the role of clarification requests and modeling.

Asking children to clarify themselves promotes their ability to uniquely identify objects in referential communication tasks. However, little is known about whether parents ask preschoolers for clarification during interactions and, if so, how. Study 1 explored how mothers clarify their preschoolers' ambiguous descriptions of the characters in their narratives, and whether clarification requests affect children's repairs of their ambiguous descriptions.

Using virtual environments to investigate wayfinding in 8- to 12-year-olds and adults.

Wayfinding is the ability to learn and recall a route through an environment. Theories of wayfinding suggest that for children to learn a route successfully, they must have repeated experience of it, but in this experiment we investigated whether children could learn a route after only a single experience of the route. A total of 80 participants from the United Kingdom in four groups of 20 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults were shown a route through a 12-turn maze in a virtual environment.

What's Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production.

Of all the things a person could say in a given situation, what determines what is worth saying? Greenfield's principle of informativeness states that right from the onset of language, humans selectively comment on whatever they find unexpected. In this article, we quantify this tendency using information-theoretic measures and report on a study in which we tested the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that have a low frequency given the context, because these will be most informative. Using corpora of child-directed speech, we identified adjectives that varied in how informative (i.

A randomised controlled trial to test the effect of promoting caregiver contingent talk on language development in infants from diverse socioeconomic status backgrounds.

Background: Early language skills are critical for later academic success. Lower socioeconomic status (SES) children tend to start school with limited language skills compared to advantaged peers. We test the hypothesis that this is due in part to differences in caregiver contingent talk during infancy (how often the caregiver talks about what is in the focus of the infant's attention).

What Paves the Way to Conventional Language? The Predictive Value of Babble, Pointing, and Socioeconomic Status.

A child's first words mark the emergence of a uniquely human ability. Theories of the developmental steps that pave the way for word production have proposed that either vocal or gestural precursors are key. These accounts were tested by assessing the developmental synchrony in the onset of babbling, pointing, and word production for 46 infants observed monthly between the ages of 9 and 18 months.

Encouraging 5-year olds to attend to landmarks: a way to improve children's wayfinding strategies in a virtual environment.

Wayfinding is defined as the ability to learn and remember a route through an environment. Previous researchers have shown that young children have difficulties remembering routes. However, very few researchers have considered how to improve young children's wayfinding abilities.

Origins of the human pointing gesture: a training study.

Despite its importance in the development of children's skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra daily experience with pointing as compared with a control group who had extra experience with musical activities. One hundred and two infants of 9, 10, or 11 months of age were seen at the beginning, middle, and end of this one-month period and tested for declarative pointing and gaze following.

Two- and four-year-olds learn to adapt referring expressions to context: effects of distracters and feedback on referential communication.

Children often refer to things ambiguously but learn not to from responding to clarification requests. We review and explore this learning process here. In Study 1, eighty-four 2- and 4-year-olds were tested for their ability to request stickers from either (a) a small array with one dissimilar distracter or (b) a large array containing similar distracters.

Children's Production of Unfamiliar Word Sequences Is Predicted by Positional Variability and Latent Classes in a Large Sample of Child-Directed Speech.

We explore whether children's willingness to produce unfamiliar sequences of words reflects their experience with similar lexical patterns. We asked children to repeat unfamiliar sequences that were identical to familiar phrases (e.g.

What's in a manner of speaking? Children's sensitivity to partner-specific referential precedents.

Do young children form "referential pacts"? If a person has referred to an object with a certain term (e.g., the horse), will children expect this person to use this term in the future but allow others to use a different expression (e.

Stored word sequences in language learning: the effect of familiarity on children's repetition of four-word combinations.

Recent accounts of the development of grammar propose that children remember utterances they hear and draw generalizations over these stored exemplars. This study tested these accounts' assumption that children store utterances as wholes by testing memory for familiar sequences of words. Using a newly available, dense corpus of child-directed speech, we identified frequently occurring chunks in the input (e.

How toddlers and preschoolers learn to uniquely identify referents for others: a training study.

This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.