Research examining relations between language skills and social competence has yielded mixed findings. Three meta-analyses investigated links between language skills (overall, receptive, and expressive) and social competence in 2- to 12-year-old children. Data from 130 studies representing 62,120 children (M age at language assessment = 4.70…

Background: The evidence on the effect of age on the receptive and expressive language skills of individuals with Down syndrome is inconclusive. Recent research highlights the relevance of having tools to detect age-related changes in language skills. Method: Data were collected on 45 adults with Down syndrome. All were assessed with the Peabody…

Spoken narrative skills are crucial to the social and academic success of young people; however, research indicates that this may be an area of challenge for autistic adolescents. Most previous studies have used narrative elicitation tasks that incorporate visual support, and little is known about how autistic adolescents perform on less…

Purpose: This study evaluates the impact of temporal synchrony between maternal touch and speech on children's early language development. It investigates whether the proportion of word-touch co-occurrence, overlap, and alignment precision in maternal input influences language acquisition, hypothesizing that such synchrony boosts infants'…

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated the influences of child-based and parental factors on conversational latency in autistic children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 autistic children aged…

The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

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 rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

It is established that a greater rate of conversational turns (CTs) is associated with improved language outcomes for hearing children (HC). This study investigates the number of CTs experienced by deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and HC--a total of 10 children matched for age, gender and Special Educational Needs (SEN) in an Early Years…

Purpose: Prior work has found that "late talkers" (LTs) as a group continue to demonstrate lower language and reading outcomes compared to their typically developing (TD) peers even into young adulthood. Others identified that children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) show difficulties later with theory of mind (ToM)…

Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis with developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, it is recommended to evaluate both languages. However, unlike their monolingual peers, bilingual children acquire their heritage language under adverse input conditions. Focusing on Levantine Arabic, the study evaluates the clinical utility of a…

Purpose: Despite known motor and spoken language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the motor skills underlying speech production and their relationship with language skills have rarely been directly investigated in this population. Method: Thirty-nine autistic children (14 minimally verbal [MV], 25 verbal [V]) and 11 non-autistic…

Purpose: Toddlers with Down syndrome (DS) showcase comparable or higher rates of gestures than chronological age-- and language-matched toddlers without DS. Little is known about how gesture use in toddlers with DS relates to multiple domains of development, including motor, pragmatics, language, and visual reception (VR) skills. Unexplored is…

Purpose: The primary aim of the study was to examine the association between early childhood practitioners' use of language facilitation strategies during interactive book reading of informational texts related to science and the language skills of preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Twenty-four practitioners (12…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on third language (L3) development set in bilingual communities is scarce, outdated, and has provided mixed results. This study investigated the effects of exposure and age of onset of acquisition (AOA) of L3-English, as well as first and second language (L1/L2) skills and use, in the development of…