{"pk":26915,"title":"More Siblings Means Lower Input Quality in Early Language Development","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Previous research has suggested that first-born infants acquire words faster than their later-born peers (Berglund etal., 2005), but may have some disadvantages in other aspects of syntactic and socio-communicative development (e.g. Hoff,2006). Here we analyzed infants’ early lexical development alongside their caregiver input from 6-18 months, in relation to howmany siblings they have. We find that having more siblings (rather than being first- or later-born) has a gradient and negativerelationship with infants’ language development. This affect appears to be manifested in caregiver input: across three differentmeasures of input quality/quantity, disadvantages were found for infants with more siblings. Having a larger number of siblingsdiminished the quality of the input and led to slower overall lexical development. Implications for language development andlearning within dyadic and multi-member contexts are discussed.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rx2z8pn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Catherine","middle_name":"","last_name":"Laing","name_suffix":"","institution":"Duke University","department":""},{"first_name":"Elika","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bergelson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Duke University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26915/galley/16551/download/"}]}