Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in a set of predictable activities over the course of a day that provide them with opportunities to hear unique language functions and forms. Mothers and their firstborn 13-month-old infants (N = 40) were video-recorded during everyday activities at home. Transcriptions and coding of mothers' speech to infants-time-locked to activities of feeding, grooming, booksharing, object play, and transition-revealed that the amount, diversity, pragmatic functions, and semantic content of maternal language systematically differed by activity. The activities of everyday life shape language inputs to infants in ways that highlight word meaning.

Language learning is socially embedded. As infants engage with their environments, they have opportunities to capitalize on social and environmental cues to word meaning. Infants look to places and things that other people signal through gaze, gesture and touch, and benefit from multi-modal cues to language input as a result (

Assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relies on expert clinician observation and judgment, but objective measurement tools have the potential to provide additional information on ASD symptom severity. Diagnostic evaluations for ASD typically include the autism diagnostic observation schedule (ADOS‐2), a semi‐structured assessment composed of a series of social presses. The current study examined associations between concurrent objective features of child vocalizations during the ADOS‐2 and examiner‐rated autism symptom severity. The sample included 66 children (49 male; M = 40 months, SD = 10.58) evaluated in a university‐based clinic, 61 of whom received an ASD diagnosis. Research reliable administration of the ADOS‐2 provided social affect (SA) and restricted and repetitive behavior (RRB) calibrated severity scores (CSS). Audio was recorded from examiner‐worn eyeglasses during the ADOS‐2 and child and adult speech were differentiated with LENA SP Hub. PRAAT was used to ascertain acoustic features of the audio signal, specifically the mean fundamental vocal frequency (F0) of LENA‐identified child speech‐like vocalizations (those with phonemic content), child cry vocalizations, and adult speech. Sphinx‐4 was employed to estimate child and adult phonological features indexed by the average consonant and vowel count per vocalization. More than a quarter of the variance in ADOS‐2 RRB CSS was predicted by the combination of child phoneme count per vocalization and child vocalization F0. Findings indicate that both acoustic and phonological features of child vocalizations are associated with expert clinician ratings of autism symptom severity. Lay Summary Determination of the severity of autism spectrum disorder is based in part on expert (but subjective) clinician observations during the ADOS‐2. Two characteristics of child vocalizations—a smaller number of speech‐like sounds per vocalization and higher pitched vocalizations (including cries)—were associated with greater autism symptom severity. The results suggest that objectively ascertained characteristics of children's vocalizations capture variance in children's restricted and repetitive behaviors that are reflected in clinician severity indices.

One cue that may facilitate children's word learning is iconicity, or the correspondence between a word's form and meaning. Some have even proposed that iconicity in the early lexicon may serve to help children learn how to learn words, supporting the acquisition of even noniconic, or arbitrary, word–referent associations. However, this proposal remains untested. Here, we investigate the iconicity of caregivers’ speech to young children during a naturalistic free‐play session with novel stimuli and ask whether the iconicity of caregivers’ speech facilitates children's learning of the noniconic novel names of those stimuli. Thirty‐four 1.5‐2‐year‐olds (19 girls; half monolingual English learners and half bilingual English‐Spanish learners) participated in a naturalistic free‐play task with their caregivers followed by a test of word‐referent retention. We found that caregivers’ use of iconicity, particularly in utterances in which they named the novel stimuli, was associated with the likelihood that children learned that novel name. This result held even when controlling for other factors associated with word learning, such as the concreteness and frequency of words in caregiver speech. Together, the results demonstrate that iconicity not only can serve to help children identify the referent of novel words (as in previous research) but can also support their ability to retain even noniconic word‐referent mappings.

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