Naturalistic studies show that children can create language-like communication systems in the absence of conventional language. However, experimental evidence is mixed. We address this discrepancy using an experimental paradigm that simulates naturalistic sign creation. Specifically, we tested if a sample of 6- to 12-year-old children (52 girls…

Purpose: We aimed to develop a noninvasive neural test of language comprehension to use with nonspeaking children for whom standard behavioral testing is unreliable (e.g., minimally verbal autism). Our aims were threefold. First, we sought to establish the sensitivity of two auditory paradigms to elicit neural responses in individual neurotypical…

It has been hypothesized that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty processing sound-based information, including storing and accessing phonological representations in the lexicon. Tasks are emerging in the literature that provide a measure of the quality of stored phonological representations, without requiring a verbal…

Purpose: Impaired lexical stress production characterizes multiple pediatric speech disorders. Effective remediation strategies are not available, and little is known about the normal process of learning to assign and produce lexical stress. This study examined whether typically developing (TD) children can be trained to produce lexical stress on…

Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each…

The presence or absence of clinically delayed language development prior to 3 years of age is a key, but contentious, clinical feature distinguishing autism from Asperger's disorder. The aim of this study was to examine language processing in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's disorder (AD) using a task which taps lexical…

Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

Investigated a model of metalinguistic awareness, which consists of two components (the control of linguistic processing and the analysis of linguistic knowledge), in children between the ages of five and seven years. Each of the two components was assessed by four metalinguistic tasks. (Contains 35 references.) (JL)