Across demographics and recent history, most parents sing to their infants and toddlers daily.

Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants (N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is unrelated to parents' income or ethnicity. Two reliable individual differences emerged, however: (i) fathers sing less than mothers and (ii) as infants grow older, parents sing less. Moreover, the latter effect of child age was specific to singing and was not reflected in reports of the frequency of playing recorded music. Last, we meta-analysed reports of the frequency of infant-directed singing and found little change in its frequency over the past 30 years, despite substantial changes in the technological environment in the home. These findings, consistent with theories of the psychological functions of music, in general, and infant-directed singing, in particular, demonstrate the everyday nature of music in infancy. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'.

Impacts of a Comprehensive School Readiness Curriculum for Preschool Children at Risk for Educational Difficulties.

This article reports findings from a cluster-randomized study of an integrated literacy- and math-focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business-as-usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students from each classroom (N = 760) who averaged 4.48 (SD = 0.44) years of age at the start of the school year. There were positive impacts of the two versions of the curriculum on language, phonological awareness, math, and socioemotional outcomes, but there were no added benefits to academic or socioemotional outcomes for the children receiving explicit socioemotional instruction. Results are discussed with relevance to early childhood theory, policy, and goals of closing the school readiness gap.

Enhancing early child care quality and learning for toddlers at risk: the responsive early childhood program.

Despite reports of positive effects of high-quality child care, few experimental studies have examined the process of improving low-quality center-based care for toddler-age children. In this article, we report intervention effects on child care teachers' behaviors and children's social, emotional, behavioral, early literacy, language, and math outcomes as well as the teacher-child relationship. The intervention targeted the use of a set of responsive teacher practices, derived from attachment and sociocultural theories, and a comprehensive curriculum. Sixty-five childcare classrooms serving low-income 2- and 3-year-old children were randomized into 3 conditions: business-as-usual control, Responsive Early Childhood Curriculum (RECC), and RECC plus explicit social-emotional classroom activities (RECC+). Classroom observations showed greater gains for RECC and RECC+ teachers' responsive practices including helping children manage their behavior, establishing a predictable schedule, and use of cognitively stimulating activities (e.g., shared book reading) compared with controls; however, teacher behaviors did not differ for focal areas such as sensitivity and positive discipline supports. Child assessments demonstrated that children in the interventions outperformed controls in areas of social and emotional development, although children's performance in control and intervention groups was similar for cognitive skills (language, literacy, and math). Results support the positive impact of responsive teachers and environments providing appropriate support for toddlers' social and emotional development. Possible explanations for the absence of systematic differences in children's cognitive skills are considered, including implications for practice and future research targeting low-income toddlers.

Dialect-neutral indices of narrative cohesion and evaluation.

PURPOSE: This study compared the development of essential elements of narrative skill in children from African American English (AAE)- and general American English (GAE)-speaking communities using an innovative elicitation and evaluation protocol consisting of four key indices of narrative language: (a) reference contrasting, (b) temporal expressions, (c) mental state descriptions, and (d) understanding of behavior based on false belief. METHOD: Participants were 291 AAE speakers and 238 GAE speakers, 4 to 9 years of age. Approximately one-third of both dialect groups were identified as having language impairments. Children generated 2 stories based on short picture sequences. Their stories were coded for the 4 key indices of narrative language. Analyses of variance were performed with subsets of the measures and a composite index with all measures combined as outcomes; and with age, dialect group, and clinical status as predictors. RESULTS: Age and clinical status had statistically significant effects on the subset measures and the composite score. Variation between AAE and GAE dialect was not a significant factor. CONCLUSION: By focusing on dialect-neutral elements of narratives--creating links across sentences and providing mental state interpretations--this study adds to our knowledge of development and impairment in narrative production among both AAE- and GAE-background children.

Deception dissociates from false belief reasoning in deaf children: implications for the implicit versus explicit theory of mind distinction.

Deception is a controversial aspect of theory of mind, and researchers disagree about whether it entails an understanding of the false beliefs of one's opponent. The present study asks whether children with delayed language and delayed explicit false belief reasoning can succeed on explicit deception tasks. Participants were 45 orally taught deaf children with varying language delays aged 4.5-8 years and 45 hearing children aged 3.5-6 years. Participants received a battery of language, executive function, deception, and both verbal and low-verbal false belief tasks. The result reveal a dissociation of deception and false belief tasks: the deaf children are on par with their hearing peers on deception games, but show significant delays in false belief tasks even when the language demands are made minimal. Furthermore, different skills are predictors of success for the two types of task in the deaf children: language, and in particular complement syntax, is the best predictor of false belief reasoning; but executive function skills, especially inhibitory control, are the best predictors of deception. It is argued that deception at this level can be handled by behaviour rules without reference to mental states.

Wh-questions: Moving beyond the first Phase.

The paper presents a feature-checking theory of wh-movement that attempts to accommodate both adult grammar and the path of acquisition by which children handle long distance movement, indirect questions and partial movement. Partial movement is not a grammatical option in English but it is adopted as an option in development. The account makes several predictions about the performance of children with Specific Language impairment (SLI), and also predicts a particular advantage for children who speak African American English (AAE) over those who speak Mainstream American English (MAE). The empirical data are taken from a study of 590 children, both typically-developing and language-impaired, and both AAE and MAE speaking, aged four to nine years. The tasks involved answering wh-questions after stories as part of the field-testing of a new language assessment instrument. The questions included multi-clause questions with or without medial wh-complementizers. The predictions are borne out that children with language impairment have prolonged difficulty with real long distance movement and medial questions, and that children who speak AAE are at an advantage in avoiding certain errors (partial movement) because of the dialect's characteristic marking of indirect questions via inversion in the lower clause.

Assessment of language acquisition.

This review addresses questions of what should be assessed in language acquisition, and how to do it. The design of a language assessment is crucially connected to its purpose, whether for diagnosis, development of an intervention plan, or for research. Precise profiles of language strengths and weaknesses are required for clear definitions of the phenotypes of particular language and neurodevelopmental disorders. The benefits and costs of formal tests versus language sampling assessments are reviewed. Content validity, theoretically and empirically grounded in child language acquisition, is claimed to be centrally important for appropriate assessment. Without this grounding, links between phenomena can be missed, and interpretations of underlying difficulties can be compromised. Sensitivity and specificity of assessment instruments are often assessed using a gold standard of existing tests and diagnostic practices, but problems arise if that standard is biased against particular groups or dialects. The paper addresses the issues raised by the goal of unbiased assessment of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, especially speakers of non-mainstream dialects or bilingual children. A variety of new approaches are discussed for language assessment, including dynamic assessment, experimental tools such as intermodal preferential looking, and training studies that assess generalization. Stress is placed on the need for measures of the process of acquisition rather than just levels of achievement. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Language and theory of mind: a study of deaf children.

Theory-of-mind (ToM) abilities were studied in 176 deaf children aged 3 years 11 months to 8 years 3 months who use either American Sign Language (ASL) or oral English, with hearing parents or deaf parents. A battery of tasks tapping understanding of false belief and knowledge state and language skills, ASL or English, was given to each child. There was a significant delay on ToM tasks in deaf children of hearing parents, who typically demonstrate language delays, regardless of whether they used spoken English or ASL. In contrast, deaf children from deaf families performed identically to same-aged hearing controls (N=42). Both vocabulary and understanding syntactic complements were significant independent predictors of success on verbal and low-verbal ToM tasks.

Assessing pragmatic skills in elicited production.

In developing a test of pragmatic skills for children ages 4 to 9 years, we focused on a number of functional language skills that are important for children's success in early schooling and for the development of fluent reading and writing. They included (1) wh-question asking, (2) communicative role taking, (3) linking events in a cohesive narrative, and (4) articulating the mental states of the characters in a story. All of the proposed items provide specific referential support and pragmatic motivation for the forms and content to be produced by the child. The pictured materials and elicitation prompts constrain the range of appropriate utterances, so the children's productions are more easily scored than an open-ended spontaneous speech sample. All tasks described show a clear developmental trend, a clear separation between the performance of typically developing and language-impaired children, and no performance differences between African American English- and Mainstream American English-speaking children.