Language Matters: Denying the Existence of the 30-Million-Word Gap Has Serious Consequences

Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) aim to debunk what is called the 30-million-word gap by claiming that children from lower income households hear more speech than Hart and Risley () reported. We address why the 30-million-word gap should not be abandoned, and the importance of retaining focus on the vital ingredient to language learning-quality speech directed to children rather than overheard speech, the focus of Sperry et al.'s argument. Three issues are addressed: Whether there is a language gap; the characteristics of speech that promote language development; and the importance of language in school achievement. There are serious risks to claims that low-income children, on average, hear sufficient, high-quality language relative to peers from higher income homes.

Conversation about the future self improves preschoolers' prospection abilities

Prospection, the ability to engage in future-oriented thinking and decision making, begins to develop during the preschool years yet remains far from adult-like. One specific challenge for children of this age is with regard to thinking and reasoning about their future selves. Drawing from work indicating the importance of adult-child conversation in language and cognitive development, the current study examined the extent to which conversations about the future and the self may facilitate preschool-aged children's prospective thinking. The participants, 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 68), were randomly assigned to read books surrounding one of four topics with an adult experimenter: their present self, their future self, another child's present self, or another child's future self. Children whose conversations were centered on their future selves outperformed other children in the sample on a battery of prospection assessments taken immediately after the manipulation. Of the three prospection assessments administered, the manipulation had the strongest effect on children's prospective memories. Results are discussed in terms of the role that everyday conversation can play in fostering children's cognitive development during the early childhood years.

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Socioeconomic disparities in children's early vocabulary skills can be traced back to disparities in gesture use at age one and are due, in part, to the quantity and quality of communication children are exposed to by parents. Further, parents' mindsets about intelligence contribute to their interactions with their children. We implemented a parent gesture intervention with a growth mindset component with 47 parents of 10-month-olds to determine whether this approach would increase parents' use of the pointing gesture, infants' use of pointing, and child vocabulary growth. The intervention had an effect on parent gesture such that by child age 12-months, parents who received the intervention increased in their pointing more than parents in the control condition. Importantly, the intervention also had a significant effect on child gesture use with parents. There was no main effect of the intervention on child vocabulary. Further, the effect of the intervention on pointing was stronger for parents who endorsed fixed mindsets at baseline, and had an added benefit of increased vocabulary growth from 10-18 months for children of those parents who endorsed fixed mindsets. Incorporating growth mindset approaches into parenting interventions is encouraged.

Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children's Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function

Children's early language exposure impacts their later linguistic skills, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement, and large disparities in language exposure are associated with family socioeconomic status (SES). However, there is little evidence about the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between language experience and linguistic and cognitive development. Here, language experience was measured from home audio recordings of 36 SES-diverse 4- to 6-year-old children. During a story-listening functional MRI task, children who had experienced more conversational turns with adults-independently of SES, IQ, and adult-child utterances alone-exhibited greater left inferior frontal (Broca's area) activation, which significantly explained the relation between children's language exposure and verbal skill. This is the first evidence directly relating children's language environments with neural language processing, specifying both an environmental and a neural mechanism underlying SES disparities in children's language skills. Furthermore, results suggest that conversational experience impacts neural language processing over and above SES or the sheer quantity of words heard.

Exploring Infant Gesture and Joint Attention as Related Constructs and as Predictors of Later Language

In infancy, use of gesture and the ability to engage in joint attention with others both predict later language development. Conceptually, gesture and joint attention abilities may reflect a similar underlying social communicative skill. However, these abilities are often studied separately. Despite the fact that gesture is often used in episodes of joint attention, little is known about the degree to which measures of gesture use and joint attention ability are associated with one another or how they similarly, or differentially, predict children's language abilities. Participants in the current study were 53 infants. At 12-months, multiple measures of infants' gesture use were gleaned from a free-play interaction with a parent. Infants' responding to and initiating joint attention were measured via the Early Social-Communicative Scales (ESCS, Mundy et al., 2003). Infants' expressive and receptive language was measured at 24-months with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995). A factor analysis including gesture and joint attention measures indicated that at 12-months joint attention, particularly responding to joint attention, reflects a similar underlying construct with infant gesture use, yet they uniquely predict later language ability.

Fathers' repetition of words is coupled with children's vocabularies

Differences in vocabulary size among children can be explained in part by differences in parents' language input, but features of caregivers' input can be more or less beneficial depending on children's language abilities. The current study focused on a specific feature of infant-directed speech: parents' repetition of words across utterances. Although previous work with infants showed a positive relation between repetition and children's vocabulary, we predicted that this would not be the case later in development. Instead, parents may use less repetition as their children become increasingly proficient language learners. In the current study, we examined the extent to which low-income fathers of 24-month-olds (N=41) repeat words to their children using three indices: type-token ratio, automated repetition index, and partial repetition of open-class words. The same finding emerged across all measures of repetition: Fathers whose children had larger vocabularies at 24months repeated wordslessoften, suggesting a developmental coupling of fathers' input and children's language proficiency.

Children's Early Decontextualized Talk Predicts Academic Language Proficiency in Midadolescence

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk-talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend-at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension. Yet research on precursors to AL proficiency is scarce. Child decontextualized talk is known to be a predictor of early discourse development, but its relation to later language outcomes remains unclear. Forty-two children and their caregivers participated in this study. The proportion of child talk that was decontextualized emerged as a significant predictor of seventh-grade AL proficiency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, parent decontextualized talk, child total words, child vocabulary, and child syntactic comprehension.

Young children communicate their ignorance and ask questions

Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information transmission and actively exploit it to fill gaps in their knowledge has not been systematically investigated. We review evidence that toddlers exhibit various expressive behaviors when faced with knowledge gaps. They look toward an available adult, convey ignorance via nonverbal gestures (flips/shrugs), and increasingly produce verbal acknowledgments of ignorance ("I don't know"). They also produce comments and questions about what their interlocutors might know and adopt an interrogative stance toward them. Thus, in the second and third years, children actively seek information from interlocutors via nonverbal gestures or verbal questions and display a heightened tendency to encode and retain such sought-after information.

Variations in the recruitment of syntactic knowledge contribute to SES differences in syntactic development

Average differences in children's language abilities by socioeconomic status (SES) emerge early in development and predict academic achievement. Previous research has focused on coarse-grained outcome measures such as vocabulary size, but less is known about the extent to which SES differences exist in children's strategies for comprehension and learning. We measured children's (N = 98) comprehension of passive sentences to investigate whether SES differences are more pronounced in overall knowledge of the construction or in more specific abilities to process sentences during real-time interpretation. SES differences in comprehension emerged when syntactic revision of passives was necessary, and disappeared when the need to revise was removed. Further, syntactic revision but not knowledge of the passive best explained the association between SES and a standardized measure of syntactic development. These results demonstrate that SES differences in syntactic development may result from how children recruit syntactic information within sentences.

Training preschoolers' prospective abilities through conversation about the extended self

The ability to act on behalf of one's future self is related to uniquely human abilities such as planning, delay of gratification, and goal attainment. Although prospection develops rapidly during early childhood, little is known about the mechanisms that support its development. Here we explored whether encouraging children to talk about their extended selves (self outside the present context) boosts their prospective abilities. Preschoolers (N = 81) participated in a 5-min interaction with an adult in which they were asked to talk about events in the near future, distant future, near past, or present. Compared with children discussing their present and distant future, children asked to discuss events in their near future or near past displayed better planning and prospective memory. Additionally, those 2 conditions were most effective in eliciting self-projection (use of personal pronouns). Results suggest that experience communicating about the temporally contiguous, extended self may promote children's future-oriented thinking. (PsycINFO Database Record

Exploring socioeconomic differences in syntactic development through the lens of real-time processing

Differences in caregiver input across socioeconomic status (SES) predict syntactic development, but the mechanisms are not well understood. Input effects may reflect the exposure needed to acquire syntactic representations during learning (e.g., does the child have the relevant structures for passive sentences?) or access this knowledge during communication (e.g., can she use the past participle to infer the meaning of passives?). Using an eye-tracking and act-out paradigm, the current study distinguishes these mechanisms by comparing the interpretation of actives and passives in 3- to 7-year-olds (n=129) from varying SES backgrounds. During the presentation of spoken sentences, fixations revealed robust disambiguation of constructions by children from higher-SES backgrounds, but less sensitivity by lower-SES counterparts. After sentence presentation, decreased sensitivity generated interpretive challenges and average SES-related differences for passives requiring syntactic revision ("The seal is quickly eaten by it"). Critically, no differences were found when revision was not needed ("It is quickly eaten by the seal"). These results suggest that all children shared an ability to acquire passives, but SES-related differences in real-time processing can impact the accuracy of utterance interpretation.

Low-income fathers' speech to toddlers during book reading versus toy play

Fathers' child-directed speech across two contexts was examined. Father-child dyads from sixty-nine low-income families were videotaped interacting during book reading and toy play when children were 2;0. Fathers used more diverse vocabulary and asked more questions during book reading while their mean length of utterance was longer during toy play. Variation in these specific characteristics of fathers' speech that differed across contexts was also positively associated with child vocabulary skill measured on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Results are discussed in terms of how different contexts elicit specific qualities of child-directed speech that may promote language use and development.

Perceived communicative intent in gesture and language modulates the superior temporal sulcus

Behavioral evidence and theory suggest gesture and language processing may be part of a shared cognitive system for communication. While much research demonstrates both gesture and language recruit regions along perisylvian cortex, relatively less work has tested functional segregation within these regions on an individual level. Additionally, while most work has focused on a shared semantic network, less has examined shared regions for processing communicative intent. To address these questions, functional and structural MRI data were collected from 24 adult participants while viewing videos of an experimenter producing communicative, Participant-Directed Gestures (PDG) (e.g., "Hello, come here"), noncommunicative Self-adaptor Gestures (SG) (e.g., smoothing hair), and three written text conditions: (1) Participant-Directed Sentences (PDS), matched in content to PDG, (2) Third-person Sentences (3PS), describing a character's actions from a third-person perspective, and (3) meaningless sentences, Jabberwocky (JW). Surface-based conjunction and individual functional region of interest analyses identified shared neural activation between gesture (PDGvsSG) and language processing using two different language contrasts. Conjunction analyses of gesture (PDGvsSG) and Third-person Sentences versus Jabberwocky revealed overlap within left anterior and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). Conjunction analyses of gesture and Participant-Directed Sentences to Third-person Sentences revealed regions sensitive to communicative intent, including the left middle and posterior STS and left inferior frontal gyrus. Further, parametric modulation using participants' ratings of stimuli revealed sensitivity of left posterior STS to individual perceptions of communicative intent in gesture. These data highlight an important role of the STS in processing participant-directed communicative intent through gesture and language. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3444-3461, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Input and uptake at 7 months predicts toddler vocabulary: the role of child-directed speech and infant processing skills in language development

Both the input directed to the child, and the child's ability to process that input, are likely to impact the child's language acquisition. We explore how these factors inter-relate by tracking the relationships among: (a) lexical properties of maternal child-directed speech to prelinguistic (7-month-old) infants (N = 121); (b) these infants' abilities to segment lexical targets from conversational child-directed utterances in an experimental paradigm; and (c) the children's vocabulary outcomes at age 2;0. Both repetitiveness in maternal input and the child's speech segmentation skills at age 0;7 predicted language outcomes at 2;0; moreover, while these factors were somewhat inter-related, they each had independent effects on toddler vocabulary skill, and there was no interaction between the two.

Going Beyond Input Quantity: Wh-Questions Matter for Toddlers' Language and Cognitive Development

There are clear associations between the overall quantity of input children are exposed to and their vocabulary acquisition. However, by uncovering specific features of the input that matter, we can better understand the mechanisms involved in vocabulary learning. We examine whether exposure to wh-questions, a challenging quality of the communicative input, is associated with toddlers' vocabulary and later verbal reasoning skills in a sample of low-income, African-American fathers and their 24-month-old children (n = 41). Dyads were videotaped in free play sessions at home. Videotapes were transcribed and reliably coded for sheer quantity of fathers' input (number of utterances) as well as the number of wh-questions fathers produce. Children's productive vocabulary was measured at 24 months using the McArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventory MCDI (completed by the mothers), and children's verbal reasoning skills were measured 1 year later using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Results indicate that the overall quantity of father talk did not relate to children's vocabulary or reasoning skills. However, fathers' use of wh-questions (but not other questions) related to both vocabulary and reasoning outcomes. Children's responses to wh-questions were more frequent and more syntactically complex, measured using the mean length of utterance (MLU), than their responses to other questions. Thus, posing wh-questions to 2-year-olds is a challenging type of input, which elicits a verbal response from the child that likely helps build vocabulary and foster verbal reasoning abilities.

Vocabulary, syntax, and narrative development in typically developing children and children with early unilateral brain injury: early parental talk about the "there-and-then" matters

This study examines the role of a particular kind of linguistic input--talk about the past and future, pretend, and explanations, that is, talk that is decontextualized--in the development of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative skill in typically developing (TD) children and children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI). Decontextualized talk has been shown to be particularly effective in predicting children's language skills, but it is not clear why. We first explored the nature of parent decontextualized talk and found it to be linguistically richer than contextualized talk in parents of both TD and BI children. We then found, again for both groups, that parent decontextualized talk at child age 30 months was a significant predictor of child vocabulary, syntax, and narrative performance at kindergarten, above and beyond the child's own early language skills, parent contextualized talk and demographic factors. Decontextualized talk played a larger role in predicting kindergarten syntax and narrative outcomes for children with lower syntax and narrative skill at age 30 months, and also a larger role in predicting kindergarten narrative outcomes for children with BI than for TD children. The difference between the 2 groups stemmed primarily from the fact that children with BI had lower narrative (but not vocabulary or syntax) scores than TD children. When the 2 groups were matched in terms of narrative skill at kindergarten, the impact that decontextualized talk had on narrative skill did not differ for children with BI and for TD children. Decontextualized talk is thus a strong predictor of later language skill for all children, but may be particularly potent for children at the lower-end of the distribution for language skill. The findings also suggest that variability in the language development of children with BI is influenced not only by the biological characteristics of their lesions, but also by the language input they receive.

Non-word repetition in 2-year-olds: Replication of an adapted paradigm and a useful methodological extension

Accurate non-word repetition (NWR) has been largely attributed to phonological memory, although the task involves other processes including speech production, which may confound results in toddlers with developing speech production abilities. This study is based on Hoff, Core and Bridges' adapted NWR task, which includes a real-word repetition (RWR) condition. We tested 86 typically developing 2-year-olds and found relationships between NWR and both receptive and expressive vocabulary using a novel measure that controls for speech production by comparing contextually matched targets in RWR. Post hoc analyses demonstrated the influence of lexical and sublexical factors in repetition tasks. Overall, results illustrate the importance of controlling for speech production differences in young children and support a useful methodological approach for testing NWR.

Low-income, minority fathers' control strategies and their children's regulatory skills

The current study explored the bidirectional association of children's individual characteristics, fathers' control strategies at 24 months, and children's regulatory skills at prekindergarten (pre-K). Using a sample of low-income, minority families with 2-year-olds from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (n = 71), we assessed the association between child gender and vocabulary skills, fathers' control strategies at 24 months (e.g., regulatory behavior and regulatory language), and children's sustained attention and emotion regulation at prekindergarten. There were three main findings. First, fathers overwhelmingly used commands (e.g., "Do that.") to promote compliance in their 24-month-old children. Second, children's vocabulary skills predicted fathers' regulatory behaviors during a father-child interaction whereas children's gender predicted fathers' regulatory language during an interaction. Third, controlling for maternal supportiveness, fathers' regulatory behaviors at 24 months predicted children's sustained attention at pre-K whereas fathers' regulatory language at 24 months predicted children's emotion regulation at pre-K. Our findings highlight the importance of examining paternal contributions to children's regulatory skills.