The present study is based on longitudinal data from a German early childhood education and care (ECEC) governmental initiative assessing children's grammatical and vocabulary development between 2;6 and 4;0 years (N = 1,331), quality of the home learning environment and quality of the preschool setting. Results showed that the quality of the home learning environment predicted development in grammatical skills, but not in receptive vocabulary at age 4, while the effects of preschool process quality showed similar relative impacts on both language outcomes. Further analyses revealed effects of accumulated advantages of preschool quality for children from medium‐ and high‐quality home learning environments in their vocabulary development. The results are compared with previous findings from the German ECEC context and discussed with respect to implications for policy efforts to improve ECEC quality and ways in which both learning environments act together on children's development.

This study investigates whether children's preschool experiences are associated with later achievement via enhanced learning behaviors using data from a German longitudinal study following children (N = 554) from age 3 in preschool to age 8 in second grade. There were two main findings. First, results suggest that more positive learning behaviors at school entry mediate effects of teacher-child interactions in preschool on second-grade achievement. Second, these effects varied by parental socioeconomic status (SES) indicating that low-SES children benefited the most. The findings highlight the role of preschool classroom environments in shaping the school readiness of children with socioeconomic risk factors. Children's experiences in early childhood education (ECE) are foundational to later school success. There is ample evidence that the features of early teacherchild interactions contribute to the development of children's school readiness skills, in particular their early academic skills (Mashburn et al., 2008; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2016; Sylva et al., 2006) and, to some degree, to their selfregulatory and executive functioning skills (Fuhs,

In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an artifact, for example, a woman's shoe, in a referential communication task. Six-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, continued to use these same expressions with the same partner (even when they were overinformative) but shifted to simpler expressions, for example, shoe, with a new partner. In Study 2, both age groups were successful in establishing such partner-specific referential pacts with a peer when using a proper name. These results suggest that even preschool children appreciate something of the conventional nature of linguistic expressions, with significant flexibility emerging between ages 4 and 6.

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Discourse particles typically express the attitudes of interlocutors with respect to the propositional content of an utterance-for example, marking whether or not a speaker believes the content of the proposition that she uttered. In German, the particle dochwhich has no direct English translation-is commonly used to correct a belief that is thought to be common ground among those present. We asked whether German adults and 5-year-olds are able to infer that a speaker who utters doch intends to be understood in this way. Sixty-four children (4;9-5;3 years) and twenty-four adults participated in a comprehension task in which a speaker explicitly expressed either a positive belief or a negative belief. Subsequently, in both conditions, the speaker checked the truth of her previous belief and corrected her belief with doch. In both the group of adults and the group of children, polarity of the speaker's belief affected hearers' interpretations of the speaker's utterance. In a third condition we investigated whether participants could also perform the more difficult task of interpreting the speaker's utterance with doch while inferring the speaker's belief. Whereas adults showed a similar performance as in the explicit belief conditions, children showed limited abilities in keeping track of the speaker's belief.

Children's concern for others is shaped through socialization, but current theories make different predictions as to how and when in development this socializing occurs. Here we found that mothers' prosocial socialization goals (SGs) predicted concern for others in 2‐year‐old (n = 804) and 4‐year‐old (n = 714) children. In contrast, preschool teachers' SGs predicted concern for others only for 4‐year‐old children. In addition, a positive social climate among classroom peers predicted 4‐year‐olds' prosociality. These results suggest that the nuclear family environment impacts toddlers' concern for others before the broader social environment shapes their prosociality at preschool age.

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This study investigated the vocabulary development of children (N = 547) from linguistically and socioeconomically diverse classrooms in Germany from age 3 in preschool to age 7 in Grade 1. The results showed that for dual language learners (DLLs, n = 107) growth rates in their German majority language skills varied over classrooms. Compared to monolingual children, DLLs improved faster in classrooms with higher peerlevel skills in the majority language than DLLs in classrooms with lower peer-level skills (controlling for socioeconomic status and classroom quality). DLLs showed stronger growth dynamics than monolingual children during later preschool stages. The findings highlight the role of preschool peers in DLLs' acquisition of the majority language before entering elementary school.DLLs to maintain and strengthen verbal and literacy skills in their first language (Barnett, Yarosz,