Purpose: This study examined the efficacy of the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) treatment in a version that manipulated the length of clinician utterance in which a target word was presented (dose length). The study also explored ways to characterize treatment responders versus nonresponders. Method: Nineteen primarily…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to develop a valid and reliable screening tool to identify children with risk of developing language difficulties for Estonian-speaking 2- to 3-year-old children. Method: Nine hundred ninety parents of children ages 1;8-3;1 (years;months) filled in the Estonian MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development…

Purpose: We report on a replicated single-case design study that measured the feasibility of an expressive vocabulary intervention for three Cantonese-speaking toddlers with small expressive lexicons relative to their age. The aim was to assess the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic feasibility of an intervention method developed for…

Purpose: This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally. Method: The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…

The purpose of this study was to understand vocabulary characteristics in toddlers who are late talkers (LT) as compared with age-matched (AM) and vocabulary-matched (VM) peers. The semantic categories (e.g., animals, foods, toys) and the percentage of nouns, verbs, and closed-class words in the vocabularies of 36 toddlers (12 LT, 12 AM, 12 VM)…

Background: Toddlers who are late talkers demonstrate delays in phonological and lexical skills. However, the influence of phonological factors on lexical acquisition in toddlers who are late talkers has not been examined directly. Aims: To examine the influence of phonotactic probability/neighbourhood density on word learning in toddlers who were…

Children from low-income environments are at increased risk of developing language delays which can negatively affect later academic and social outcomes. As children age, deficits between children with language delays and their typically developing peers continue to widen. In order to prevent future disabilities, efficient early language screening…

This study examined the extent to which receptive and productive vocabulary between ages 12 and 18 months predicted language skills at age 24 months in children born with family risk for dyslexia (FR) and a control group born without that risk. The aim was to identify possible markers of early language delay. The authors monitored vocabulary…

Purpose: We sought to identify factors predictive of or associated with receipt of speech/language services during early childhood. We did so by analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; Andreassen & Fletcher, 2005), a nationally representative dataset maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. We…

Two studies examined the validity of parent report for measuring language in children with specific language delay using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories for comparison. Results suggest that parent report appears to be valid for measuring language production skills in this population. Validity was strongest for vocabulary…