Meredith L Rowe

• Ed.D
• Professor at Harvard University

Research in the U.S. and other Western countries shows that children’s early gesture use, which starts prior to verbal communication, is an important predictor of children’s later language development. Despite increasing efforts to study gesture use in diverse contexts, most of our knowledge on the role of gesture is largely based on populations of...

Research has documented the critical role played by the early home environment in children's mathematical development in Western contexts. Yet little is known about how Chinese parents support their preschoolers' development of math skills. The Chinese context is of particular interest because Chinese children outperform their Western counterparts...

Conversational turn-taking is a complex communicative skill that requires both linguistic and executive functioning (EF) skills, including processing input while simultaneously forming and inhibiting responses until one's turn. Adult-child turn-taking predicts children's linguistic, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, little is unde...

Exposure to communicative gestures, through their parents’ use of gestures, is associated with infants’ language development. However, the mechanisms supporting this link are not fully understood. In adults, sensorimotor brain activity occurs while processing communicative stimuli, including both spoken language and gestures. Using electroencephalo...

Achievement gaps in students' literacy skills by socioeconomic status (SES) are prevalent across the globe. Theory suggests that reading and writing skills rely on similar knowledge and cognitive processes, yet home-based reading interventions do not typically investigate effects on writing outcomes. Using a randomized controlled trial, we examined...

Parent–child engagement in constrained (e.g., learning alphabet letters or sounds) and unconstrained (e.g., storytelling, defining words) literacy activities are central components of the home literacy environment. Unconstrained activities are particularly important for children’s oral language and support school readiness. Yet, many parents do not...

Parenting knowledge affects parenting practices and child development, yet more information is needed about “where” parents of infants turn for information and “why” they choose these sources. Using a mixed-methods approach, the authors captured and analyzed the cited resources that 38 parents turn to when seeking information about parenting. The p...

We investigated gestures that parents used with 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old infants at high or low risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD; high-risk diagnosed with ASD: n = 21; high-risk classified as no ASD: n = 34; low-risk classified as no ASD: n = 34). We also examined infant responses to parent gestures and assessed the extent to which parent g...

Children's mathematical knowledge at school entry varies considerably and predicts long‐term achievement outcomes. Differences in children's exposure to math and number talk at home may help to explain variations in school‐entry math ability. However, nearly all research on exposure to math and number talk has been conducted with parents and presch...

In this study we investigated the impact of parental language input on language development and associated neuroscillatory patterns in toddlers at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Forty-six mother-toddler dyads at either high (n = 22) or low (n = 24) familial risk of ASD completed a longitudinal, prospective study including free-play, restin...

This study examined whether a brief parent gesture training resulted in a change in the communicative intent of pointing gestures used by parents of infants from age 10 to 12 months and whether specific types of points (declarative vs. imperative) were more or less likely to predict later child language skill at 18 months. Compared to parents who w...

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development of...

Children’s early language environments are associated with linguistic, cognitive, and academic development, as well as concurrent brain structure and function. This study investigated neurodevelopmental mechanisms linking language input to development by measuring neuroplasticity associated with an intervention designed to enhance language environm...

We examined the communicative intentions behind parents' deictic gesture use with high-risk infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 17), high-risk infants who were not diagnosed with ASD (n = 25), and low-risk infants (n = 28) at 12 months and assessed the extent to which the parental deictic gesture intentions predicted inf...

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials (target-in...

Caregivers' use of decontextualized language (DL), language that is abstract or removed from the here and now, supports preschool-aged children's language, cognitive, and social-cognitive development. Studies comparing caregiver-child DL across cultures have focused primarily on one type of DL-past narratives. Very few studies have examined cross-c...

Children’s early language environments are associated with linguistic, cognitive, and academic development, as well as concurrent brain structure and function. This study investigated neurodevelopmental mechanisms linking language input and development by measuring neuroplasticity associated with an intervention designed to enhance language environ...

We investigated gesture production in infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and caregiver responsiveness between 12 and 24 months of age and assessed the extent to which early gesture predicts later language and ASD outcomes. Participants included 55 high-risk infants, 21 of whom later met criteria for ASD, 34 low-risk inf...

Participation in narratives that discuss the past and the future is associated with preschool-aged children’s language and cognitive development. In particular, adopting an elaborative style (asking questions to request information, and providing information) during narratives about the past has been shown to benefit children’s development, yet lit...

Behavioral and neural evidence indicates that young children who engage in more conversations with their parents have better later language skills such as vocabulary and academic language abilities. Previous studies find that the extent to which parents engage in conversational turn-taking with children varies considerably. How, then, can we promot...

Children vary extensively in their language skills at school entry, and a substantial part of this variation is due to disparities in language exposure prior to school. Because these differences have continuing impact on academic, cognitive and social development, prevention and intervention programs have been developed to address deficits in early...

We examined the language input of parents of infants at high and low familial risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and investigated reciprocal associations between parent input and child language skills in the first 2 years of life. Parent‐infant dyads (high‐risk: n = 53; low‐risk: n = 33), 19 of whom included an infant later diagnosed with ASD,...

This paper provides an overview of the features of caregiver input that facilitate language learning across early childhood. We discuss three dimensions of input quality: interactive, linguistic, and conceptual. All three types of input features have been shown to predict children's language learning, though perhaps through somewhat different mecha...

Infants’ pointing is associated with concurrent and later language development. The communicative intention behind the point – i.e., imperative versus declarative – can affect both the nature and strength of these associations, and is therefore a critical factor to consider. Parents’ pointing is associated with both infant pointing and infant langu...

We examined the styles that parents adopted while teaching a novel word to their toddlers and whether those styles related to children's word learning and engagement during the task. Participants were 36 parents and their toddlers (M age = 20 months). Parents were videotaped while teaching their children a name for a novel object. Parental utteranc...

Studies of parent-child book reading tend to focus on parents of toddlers and preschool children, but not infants. This study examined features of parents' shared reading with preverbal infants in relation to children's early language development. Forty-four mothers of diverse socioeconomic status and their 10-month-old infants were observed during...

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...

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Learning through Language - edited by Vibeke Grøver

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...

There is general agreement of the broad notion that reading and writing skills complement one another. However, when it comes to the more detailed interplay between skills at the word, sentence and text levels within and across reading and writing domains, there is much less evidence. In a study of 1160 6–9 year-old children in second and third gra...

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 (1995) 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—qualit...

Neuroscience research has elucidated broad relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and young children’s brain structure, but there is little mechanistic knowledge about specific environmental factors that are associated with specific variation in brain structure. One environmental factor, early language exposure, predicts children’s lingui...

INTRODUCTION. The early home environment is critical for laying a strong numerical foundation for young children’s development. Participation in math-related informal learning activities in the home is associated with caregiver and child talk about math; however, it is unclear which activities promote different types of math talk. METHOD. We observ...

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....

The authors examined whether participating in an early childhood theater production improves preschoolers’ pretend play, creativity and cooperation. Live coding of play sessions occurring immediately before and after 15 productions of the same interactive early childhood performance at a children’s theater were conducted. Coders reliably rated the...

How do children discover which linguistic expressions are associated with presuppositions? Do they take a direct strategy of tracking whether linguistic expressions are associated with particular speaker presuppositions? This strategy may fail children who are trying to learn about the presuppositions of so-called 'soft' presupposition triggers, wh...

In this article, I address our understanding of the word gap, or why parents’ talk to children differs by socioeconomic status. The differences in quantity and quality of parents’ input across early childhood predict children's language development and their readiness for school. As a result, a growing number of interventions target parent–child in...

BUCLD 42 Poster Presentation

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 mechanism(s) underlying the relation between language experience and linguistic/...

Preschool children’s use of decontextualized language, or talk about abstract topics beyond the here-and-now, is predictive of their kindergarten readiness and is associated with the frequency of parents’ own use of decontextualized language. Does a brief, parent-focused intervention conveying the importance of decontextualized language cause paren...

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. Alth...

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 c...

Associations between children’s need for information and mothers’ provision of information in task situations from 1 to3 years of age.

Our findings indicate that when teaching a new word to their toddlers, parents vary in their instructional styles and adjust their speech acts according to children’s language proficiency. Parents’ pointing is particularly effective in eliciting children’s production of the target word, possibly because: 1) pointing clarifies parents’ communicative...

These findings suggest that language exposure is not only related to children’s behavioral verbal abilities, but also to the structure and function of brain regions known to support speech and language comprehension and production. Furthermore, these input-brain relationships hold when controlling for individual differences in SES, highlighting the...

An important responsibility of pediatricians is to help children achieve good health, resiliency, and developmental skills, especially when faced with adversity. While psychological factors have been shown to influence both physiological health and behavioral outcomes in a variety of settings, relatively little of this research has reached the worl...

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 ext...

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 comm...

Research provides increasing evidence that a child’s experience early in life shapes their neuroanatomy and corresponding cognitive functions. One critical experience is language exposure; the quantity and quality of the language children hear during these early years impacts their overt language abilities throughout childhood and into adulthood. H...

This Viewpoint discusses features of communication between parents and children that promote children’s language acquisition. The “word gap” reflects research findings that, on average, low-income children hear 30 million fewer words and have less than half the vocabulary compared with their upper-income peers by age 3 years.1 This has become an im...

Variations in the recruitment of syntactic knowledge contribute to SES differences in syntactic development* – ERRATUM - KATHRYN A. LEECH, MEREDITH L. ROWE, YI TING HUANG

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 le...

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, whil...

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 communicati...

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...

The present studies examined whether parents' beliefs about the fixedness of ability predict their self-reported interactions with their children. Parents' fixedness beliefs were measured at two levels of specificity: their general beliefs about intelligence and their beliefs about their children's math and verbal abilities. Study 1, conducted with...

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' abili...

This study investigated the role of parenting knowledge of infant development in children's subsequent language and pre-literacy skills among White, Black and Latino families of varying socioeconomic status. Data come from 6,150 participants in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort. Mothers' knowledge of infant development was measure...

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...

Input versus intake – a commentary on Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland, and Theakson's ‘The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition’ - Volume 42 Issue 2 - MEREDITH L. ROWE

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 b...

Engaging in critical-analytic thinking is essential for knowledge construction and school success. However, little is known about how best to promote such thinking in children and adolescents. Since the research base on promoting critical-analytic thinking is nascent, considering research on fostering skills that could be considered its precursors,...

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...

Discussions that occur during book reading between parents and preschool children relate to children’s language development, especially discussions during picture books that include extended discourse, a form of abstract language. While a recent report shows increased chapter book reading among families with preschool children, it is unknown whethe...

Individual differences in children's language skills have been shown to stem in part from variations in the quantity and quality of parent speech input. However, most research focuses on mothers' input whereas less is known about the effects of variability in father input. In this article, we review the relation between parent input and child langu...

This article discusses the importance of using decontextualized language, or language that is removed from the here and now including pretend, narrative, and explanatory talk, with preschool children. The literature on parents' use of decontextualized language is reviewed and results of a longitudinal study of parent decontextualized language input...

Previous research suggests that presenting redundant nonverbal semantic information in the form of ges- tures and/or pictures may aid word learning in first and foreign languages. But do nonverbal supports help all learners equally? We address this issue by examining the role of gestures and pictures as non- verbal supports for word learning in a n...

Using data from a racially and ethnically diverse sample of low-income fathers and their 2-year-old children who participated in the Early Head Start Research Evaluation Project (n = 80), the current study explored the association among paternal depressive symptoms and level of education, fathers' language to their children, and children's language...

Quantity and quality of caregiver input was examined longitudinally in a sample of 50 parent-child dyads to determine which aspects of input contribute most to children's vocabulary skill across early development. Measures of input gleaned from parent-child interactions at child ages 18, 30, and 42 months were examined in relation to children's voc...

Research AimProcedureThe DataReferencesFurther Reading and Resources

Decades of research have shown that women's school attainment is correlated with reduced child mortality and fertility in developing countries - without clarifying the processes involved. This book proposes that literate communication skills acquired in Western-type schools constitute a causal link between schooling and maternal behavior in bureauc...

Children vary widely in the rate at which they acquire words--some start slow and speed up, others start fast and continue at a steady pace. Do early developmental variations of this sort help predict vocabulary skill just prior to kindergarten entry? This longitudinal study starts by examining important predictors (socioeconomic status [SES], pare...

Myriad studies support a relation between parental beliefs and behaviors. This study adds to the literature by focusing on the specific relationship between parental goals and their communication with toddlers. Do parents with different goals talk about different topics with their children? Parents' goals for their 30-month-olds were gathered using...

Reports an error in "What counts in the development of young children's number knowledge" by Susan C. Levine, Linda Whealton Suriyakham, Meredith L. Rowe, Janellen Huttenlocher and Elizabeth A. Gunderson ( Developmental Psychology, 2010[Sep], Vol 46[5], 1309-1319). A coding error resulted in incorrect item-level data being reported on the point-to-...

Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the numbe...

This article examines what we know about maternal schooling and child survival proposes the acquisition of literacy as a pathway of influence and reviews evidence concerning how literacy skills acquired in school affect maternal health behavior critical to child survival.

Children from low–socioeconomic status (SES) families, on average, arrive at school with smaller vocabularies than children from high-SES families. In an effort to identify precursors to, and possible remedies for, this inequality, we videotaped 50 children from families with a range of different SES interacting with parents at 14 months and assess...

The gestures children produce predict the early stages of spoken language development. Here we ask whether gesture is a global predictor of language learning, or whether particular gestures predict particular language outcomes. We observed 52 children interacting with their caregivers at home, and found that gesture use at 18 months selectively pre...