Visual attention measures of receptive vocabulary place minimal task demand on participants and produce a more accurate measure of language comprehension than parent report measures. However, current gaze-based measures employ visual comparisons limited to two simultaneous items. With this limitation, the degree of similarity of the target to the…

Language skills have long been posited to be a factor contributing to developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to evaluate whether novel word recognition, a critical skill for language development, differentiated children who stutter from children who do not stutter. Twenty children who stutter and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 3-8…

Background & Aims: Many young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate striking delays in early vocabulary development. Experimental studies that teach the meanings of novel nonwords can determine the effects of linguistic and attentional factors. One factor that may affect novel referent selection in children with ASD is…

Although it has been found that autistic children exhibit delays in executive function abilities and atypical patterns of attention, less is known about the relationship between executive function and attention abilities and social and language skills in early childhood. In this study, 180 autistic children, age 2-8 years, participated in a study…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

Purpose: This study compares online word recognition and prediction in preschoolers with (a suspicion of) a developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls. Furthermore, it investigates correlations between these measures and the link between online and off-line language scores in the DLD group. Method: Using the…

Efficient visual exploration in infancy is essential for cognitive and language development. It allows infants to participate in social interactions by attending to faces and learning about objects of interest. Visual scanning of scenes depends on a number of factors, and early differences in efficiency are likely contributing to differences in…