New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed…

Toddlers with smaller vocabulary than expected for their age are considered late talkers (LT). This study explored the effects of characteristics of words on vocabulary acquisition of 12- to 24-month-old LT children compared with an age matched (AM) and a vocabulary matched (VM) group of typically developing peers. Using the…

Background: Oral language competence provides children with an essential foundation for academic achievement and emotional well-being, yet many children enter school with delayed language and those living in economically disadvantaged areas are at disproportionate risk of experiencing language difficulties. A tiered system, offering high-quality…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

Purpose: We explore the extent to which speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are operating under assumptions about speech, language, and literacy that are not supported by evidence or are contradicted by evidence. Method: SLPs (N = 106) marked the degree to which they endorsed or rejected four true and 11 myth (i.e., false) statements on a visual…

Background: We discuss a free software system (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) that can enable fast, thorough, and informative language sample analysis (LSA). Method: We describe methods for eliciting, transcribing, analyzing, and interpreting language samples. Using a hypothetical child speaker, we illustrate use KidEval to generate a…

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…

Individuals with sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) have an increased risk of language delays and impairments. However, there are only a few data relative to their language development in early childhood. The present study aimed to investigate the preverbal skills shown by a group of 8-month-old children with SCTs to assess the presence of a possible…