Learning to coordinate attention with a social partner is a key developmental milestone for infants that usually occurs before the first year of life. This behavior reliably emerges before the onset of language acquisition and early engagement in joint attention (JA) behaviors has been shown to positively correlate with future vocabulary development. Co-occurrence of joint attention episodes and object naming events is a possible explanation for this relationship, but the precise mechanism of action remains an open question. Many experiments have been done to explore the association between JA and language development, but different researchers have used different operationalizations of JA in their coding protocols. To systematically explore the association between JA and language development and compare results reported using different operationalizations, the current study uses a structured literature search and meta-analysis of the relevant existing literature. The full analysis features 44 articles and 283 effect sizes representing 1370 participants.