Annual Research Review: How did COVID-19 affect young children's language environment and language development? A scoping review.

A diverse body of research conducted since the start of Covid-19 has investigated the impact of the pandemic on children's environments and their language development. This scoping review synthesises the peer-reviewed research literature on this topic between 2020 and 2023. Following the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology and the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, we searched five databases for studies that fulfilled the following inclusion criteria: studies with neurotypical (monolingual or multilingual) 0-6-year-old children; studies focusing on any area of language development, including sources describing literacy or educational practices that impacted language development; studies focusing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, with no restrictions of geographical location or language used by participants.

Simulating prenatal language exposure in computational models: An exploration study.

Researchers have hypothesized that infant language learning starts from the third trimester of pregnancy. This is supported by studies with fetuses and newborns showing discrimination/preference for their native language. Jointly with empirical research, initial computational modeling studies have investigated whether learning language patterns from speech input benefits from auditory prenatal language exposure (PLE), showing some advantages for prior adaptation to speech-like patterns.

Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study.

From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants' preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI data were collected from a subsample of this dataset at 18 and 24 months.

Limited evidence of test-retest reliability in infant-directed speech preference in a large preregistered infant experiment.

Test-retest reliability-establishing that measurements remain consistent across multiple testing sessions-is critical to measuring, understanding, and predicting individual differences in infant language development. However, previous attempts to establish measurement reliability in infant speech perception tasks are limited, and reliability of frequently used infant measures is largely unknown. The current study investigated the test-retest reliability of infants' preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech in a large sample (N = 158) in the context of the ManyBabies1 collaborative research project.

More frequent naps are associated with lower cognitive development in a cohort of 8-38-month-old children, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Background: How often a child naps, during infancy, is believed to reflect both intrinsic factors, that is, the need of an immature brain to consolidate information soon after it is acquired, and environmental factors. Difficulty accounting for important environmental factors that interfere with a child's sleep needs (e.g.

Rates of family history of autism and ADHD varies with recruitment approach and socio-economic status.

Family history (FH) of autism and ADHD is not often considered during the recruitment process of developmental studies, despite high recurrence rates. We looked at the rate of autism or ADHD amongst family members of young children (9 to 46 months) in three UK-based samples (N = 1055) recruited using different methods. The rate of FH-autism or FH-ADHD was 3%-9% for diagnosed cases.

Caregiver sensitivity supported young children's vocabulary development during the Covid-19 UK lockdowns.

Previous studies have shown that caregivers' sensitive, responsive interactions with young children can boost language development. We explored the association between caregivers' sensitivity and the vocabulary development of their 8-to-36-month-olds during COVID-19 when family routines were unexpectedly disrupted. Measuring caregivers' sensitivity from home interaction videos at three timepoints, we found that children who experienced more-sensitive concurrent interactions had higher receptive and expressive vocabularies (N=100).

Toward a dimensional model of risk and protective factors influencing children's early cognitive, social, and emotional development during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Variation in infants' home environment is implicated in their cognitive and psycho-social development. The pandemic has intensified variations in home environments through exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities, and increasing psychological stressors for some families. This study investigates the effects of parental (predominantly maternal) mental health, enriching activities and screen use on 280 24- to 52-month-olds' executive functions, internalising and externalising problems, and pro-social behaviour; with socioeconomic status and social support as contextual factors.

Young children's screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 12 countries.

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children's screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n = 2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 12 countries.

Not all babies are in the same boat: Exploring the effects of socioeconomic status, parental attitudes, and activities during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on early Executive Functions.

Early executive functions (EFs) lay the foundations for academic and social outcomes. In this parent-report study of 575 UK-based 8- to 36 month olds (218 followed longitudinally), we investigate how variation in the home environment before and during the 2020 pandemic relates to infants' emerging EFs. Parent-infant enriching activities were positively associated with infant Cognitive Executive Function (CEF) (encompassing inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility).

Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement.

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) during COVID-19 boosts growth in language and executive function.

High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages typically offered by ECEC.

A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech.

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference.

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study.

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.

The effects of prematurity and socioeconomic deprivation on early speech perception: A story of two different delays.

There is evidence showing that both maturational and environmental factors can impact on later language development. On the one hand, preterm birth has been found to increase the risk of deficits in the preschool and school years. Preterm children show poorer auditory discrimination, reading difficulties, poor vocabulary, less complex expressive language and lower receptive understanding than their matched controls.

Infants' sensitivity to nonadjacent vowel dependencies: The case of vowel harmony in Hungarian.

Vowel harmony is a linguistic phenomenon whereby vowels within a word share one or several of their phonological features, constituting a nonadjacent, and thus challenging, dependency to learn. It can be found in a large number of agglutinating languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and it may apply both at the lexical level (i.e.

Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Spanish.

Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject-verb (SV) agreement, whereas recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30months of age.

Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies.

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies-relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their native language.

Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities.

The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels.

Constraints on statistical computations at 10 months of age: the use of phonological features.

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French-learning infants' perceptual preference for labial-coronal (LC) words over coronal-labial words (CL) words (e.g.

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: a crosslinguistic comparison.

Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial-Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. "bat") than the opposite CL pattern (i.

A "bat" is easier to learn than a "tab": effects of relative phonotactic frequency on infant word learning.

Many studies have shown that during the first year of life infants start learning the prosodic, phonetic and phonotactic properties of their native language. In parallel, infants start associating sound sequences with semantic representations. However, the question of how these two processes interact remains largely unknown.

Effects of prior phonotactic knowledge on infant word segmentation: the case of nonadjacent dependencies.

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored whether French-learning infants use nonadjacent phonotactic regularities in their native language, which they learn between the ages of 7 and 10 months, to segment words from fluent speech.

Method: Two groups of 20 French-learning infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure at 10 and 13 months of age. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with 2 passages: 1 containing a target word with a frequent nonadjacent phonotactic structure and the other containing a target word with an infrequent nonadjacent phonotactic structure in French.

Phonotactic acquisition in healthy preterm infants.

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full-term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e.

Acquisition of Nonadjacent Phonological Dependencies in the Native Language During the First Year of Life.

Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, some holding between adjacent elements and others holding between nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonology-phonotactics, sensitivity to adjacent dependencies has been found to appear between 6 and 10 months. However, no study has directly established the emergence of sensitivity to nonadjacent phonological dependencies in the native language.