Living the first years in a pandemic: children’s linguistic development and related factors in and out of the COVID-19 lockdowns

This retrospective study provides insights on linguistic development in exceptional circumstances assessing 378 children (between 2;6 and 3;6) who lived their first years during the COVID-19 pandemic and comparing it with normative data collected before this period (<i>CDI-III-PT;</i> Cadime et al., 2021). It investigates the extent to which linguistic development was modulated by a complex set of factors, including sex, maternal education, book reading, language-promoting practices, COVID-19 infection, parental stress and sleeping problems, considering three periods (during lockdowns, out of lockdowns and at present). The results show a substantial negative effect of the pandemic on both lexical and syntactic development. Considering individual variation, structural equation modelling unveiled a complex scenario in which age, sex, book reading, language-promoting practices, sleeping problems and COVID-19 infection showed a direct effect on linguistic development. Maternal education and parental stress had an indirect effect on children's language, mediated by book reading and sleeping problems, respectively.