Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape)…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of specific acoustic patterns on word learning and segmentation in 8- to 11-year-old children and in college students. Method: Twenty-two children (ages 8;2-11;4 [years;months]) and 36 college students listened to synthesized "utterances" in artificial languages consisting of…

Purpose: This study compared attention control and flexibility in school-age children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) based on their performance on a behavioral task and parent report. We used a classic attention-shifting paradigm that included manipulations of task goals and timing to test effects of varying demands for…

Background: Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle to understand familiar words and learn unfamiliar words. We explored the extent to which these problems reflect deficient use of probabilistic gaze in the extra-linguistic context. Method: Thirty children with ASD and 43 with typical development (TD) participated in a spoken…

This study investigates the question as to whether and how the linguistic and other cognitive abilities of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ from those of children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). To this end, 27 Dutch-speaking elementary-school-age children with SLI, 27 age-matched children with HFA, and a control group…

Behavioral investigations of the acquisition of "some" have shown that children favor its logical interpretation ("some and possibly all"). Adults, however, use the pragmatic interpretation ("some but not all") derived by a scalar implicature. Certain experimental manipulations increase children's rates of adult-like…