As reading is inherently a multisensory, audiovisual (AV) process where visual symbols (i.e., letters) are connected to speech sounds, the question has been raised whether individuals with reading difficulties, like children with developmental dyslexia (DD), have broader impairments in multisensory processing. This question has been posed before,…

Purpose: The study examined the use of percent grammatical utterances (PGUs) for assessing grammatical skills in Mandarin-speaking 3-year-old children. Method: Participants were 30 Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds with typical development. Language samples were collected in two visits for each child using a picture description task. Children were…

This study investigates the speech rate of Cypriot Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) as well as the effect of age and gender. The participants were 16 children with DLD ages 4 years 11 months to 8 years 1 month and 22 children with typical language development (TLD) ages 4 years 5 months to 8 years 7 months. Both…

The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition)…

Diglossia in the Arabic language refers to the existence of two varieties of the same language: the Spoken Arabic (SA) and the Literary Arabic (LA). This study examined the development of listening comprehension (LC) among diglossic Arabic K1-K3. For this purpose, a large sample of typically developing (TD; N = 210) and developmental language…

Purpose: Word learning difficulties have been documented in multiple studies involving children with dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD; see also specific language impairment). However, no previous studies have directly contrasted word learning in these two frequently co-occurring disorders. We examined word learning in second-grade…

Purpose: Our goal was to examine the relationship between language and executive function in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and/or developmental language disorder (DLD) with a specific focus on how language in the form of self-directed speech (SDS) affects executive functioning in this population. Method: Participants included…

Rules and regularities of language are typically processed in an implicit and effortless way in the human brain. Individuals with developmental dyslexia have problems in implicit learning of regularities in sequential stimuli, but the neural basis of this deficit has not been studied. This study investigated extraction and utilization of a complex…

Purpose: Many aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems require the use of an external display that is represented via a visual modality. It is critical to evaluate and understand visual-perceptual processing in individuals with disabilities who could benefit from AAC. One way to evaluate how individuals process visual…

Purpose: Literacy instruction at home and in school, in addition to child speech and language ability, plays an essential role in reading development. The relationship between these factors in children with developmental disabilities during preschool is important to identify and describe in order to develop and test interventions that target…