Adolescent pregnancy can impact the educational attainment of adolescent mothers and language development of their children. However, support services and interventions can mitigate these risk factors. Adolescent mothers have shown success in implementing various language facilitation strategies (LFS) with their children when coached. We developed a triadic language intervention in a facilitated playgroup context to support adolescent mothers’ use of language strategies when interacting with their children. The current pilot study utilized a pre-test, post-test descriptive approach to analyze differences in adolescent mothers’ language use and parenting behaviors and their children’s language use after participation in facilitated playgroups. All adolescent mothers demonstrated enhanced parenting practices. Changes in mothers’ and children’s language from pre- to post-test were variable across participants. While this pilot study shows promising evidence of the utility of a triadic intervention situated in playgroups with adolescent families, further research is required to address the limitations of this study.

During vocabulary instruction, it is important to teach words until their representations are robust enough to be retained. For adults, the number of training sessions a target item is successfully retrieved during training predicts the likelihood of post-training retention. To assess this relationship in children, we reanalyzed data from Gordon et al. (2021b, 2022). Four- to six-year-old children completed six training days with word form-object pairs and were tested one month later. Results indicate that the number of training sessions that a word form was retrieved was positively related to post-training retention. We discuss implications for vocabulary instruction and interventions.

Infant-directed speech often has hyperarticulated features, such as point vowels whose formants are further apart than in adult-directed speech. This increased “vowel space” may reflect the caretaker’s effort to speak more clearly to infants, thus benefiting language processing. However, hyperarticulation may also result from more positive valence (e.g., speaking with positive vocal emotion) often found in mothers’ speech to infants. This study was designed to replicate others who have found hyperarticulation in maternal speech to their 6-month-olds, but also to examine their speech to a non-human infant (i.e., a puppy). We rated both kinds of maternal speech for their emotional valence and recorded mothers’ speech to a human adult. We found that mothers produced more positively valenced utterances and some hyperarticulation in both their infant- and puppy-directed speech, compared to their adult-directed speech. This finding promotes looking at maternal speech from a multi-faceted perspective that includes emotional state.

The current research examined whether children’s expectations about labeling conventions can be influenced by limited exposure to a foreign language. Three- to four-year-old Korean children were presented with two speakers who each assigned a novel label either in Korean or Spanish to a novel object. Children were asked whether both labels were acceptable for the object. Children who had more exposure to a foreign language through live social interaction, but not through media, were more likely to accept both Korean and Spanish labels. These findings indicate the influence of social interaction in foreign language exposure on children’s understanding of different labeling conventions.