Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate persistence in preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to similar-age peers with typical language (TL) on tasks designed to be moderately challenging, yet equivalent in difficulty for both groups. Method: Sixteen preschool-age children with DLD were matched to 16…

Approximately 30% of autistic children are considered minimally verbal. The field lacks an efficient and reliable measure of communicative capacity among minimally verbal autistic children. Improved methods are needed to determine which children are at greatest risk for minimally verbal outcomes to better target interventions. Here, we present the…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine potential mediators of the relationship between developmental language disorder (DLD) status and executive function performance. Method: Participants included preschoolers, of whom 80 met the diagnostic criteria for DLD and 103 were categorized as having typical language abilities. Participants'…

Purpose: A meaning-oriented auditory training program for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/hh) was assessed with regard to its efficacy in promoting novel word learning. Method: While administering the auditory training program, one of the authors (Elizabeth Mauzé) observed that children were learning words they previously did not know.…

Purpose: Verbal working memory (VWM) delays are commonly found in prelingually deaf youth with cochlear implants (CIs), albeit with considerable interindividual variability. However, little is known about the neurocognitive information-processing mechanisms underlying these delays and how these mechanisms relate to spoken language outcomes. The…

Residential mobility is a normal feature of family life but thought to be a source of disruption to a child's development. Mobility may have its own direct consequences or reflect families' capabilities and vulnerabilities. This article examines the association between changes of residence and verbal and behavioral scores of children aged 5,…

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of experiencing difficulties with the development of literacy, including the emergent literacy skills recognized to underpin conventional literacy success. Comprehensive assessment is essential. Characteristics of ASD can make assessment challenging, and this can be…

Classroom organization is an important facet of prekindergarten quality but is typically measured at a "global level" and as a "single construct." Little is known about how experiences of different facets of classroom organization--namely, exposure to teacher organizational strategies--vary across "individual…

Visual attention and active engagement during shared book reading are important for facilitating emergent literacy learning during the preschool years. Children on the autism spectrum often show difficulties in language and literacy development, yet research investigating potential indicators of shared book reading engagement, including visual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine cognitive flexibility for semantic and perceptual information in preschool children who stutter (CWS) and who do not stutter (CWNS). Method: Participants were 44 CWS and 44 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). Cognitive flexibility was measured using semantic and perceptual…

This research examined differences between dyslexic, poor and normal readers who learn in the same educational framework, across various linguistic and meta-linguistic skills in Hebrew as the first language (L1) and English as a foreign language (FL), following an intervention program focusing on English linguistic skills. The participants…

Axe (2008) speculated that some instances of intraverbal responding might be associated with limited or delayed acquisition because they require discrimination of multiple components of verbal stimuli. Past studies suggest that acquisition of responses under control of complex, multicomponent antecedent stimuli (e.g., conditional or compound…

The purpose of this study was to examine verbal fluency and verbal short-term memory in 12 adults with Down syndrome (DS) and 12 adults with Intellectual Disability (ID) of unspecified origin, matched for receptive vocabulary and chronological age. Participants' performance was assessed on two conditions of a verbal fluency test, namely, semantic…

Background: Although a large body of research has investigated teachers' reading-related knowledge and associated pedagogical practices, comparatively little is known about these factors in parents. Therefore, the present study examined the association between parental reading-related knowledge and feedback during child-to-parent reading. Methods:…

This study highlights differences in cognitive strategies in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (n = 52) on a verbal fluency task (naming as many words as possible (e.g. animals) within 60 s). The ability to form clusters of words (e.g. farm animals like "cow-horse-goat") or to switch between unrelated…