Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

Background & aims: Difficulties understanding spoken language are associated with several social and academic risks in school-age children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD). Still, interventions for this group have received little attention, and there are no reviews focusing on oral language comprehension interventions…

Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic…

Clinical Question: Among school-age children who speak AAE (P), does the use of dialect scoring modifications (I), when compared to traditional scoring methods (C), yield more reliable identification of true language disorders (O)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: Google Scholar and ASHAWire. Search Terms: (1) "dialect" OR…

Purpose: Investigations into the nature of communication disorders in autistic individuals increasingly evaluate neural responses to speech stimuli. This integrative review aimed to consolidate the available data related to speech and language processing across levels of stimulus complexity (from single speech sounds to sentences) and to relate it…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

This review examined the status of long-term memory systems in specific language impairment (SLI)--declarative memory and aspects of procedural memory in particular. Studies included in the review were identified following a systematic search of the literature and findings combined using meta-analysis. This review showed that individuals with SLI…

Background: Fast ForWord is a suite of computer-based language intervention programs designed to improve children's reading and oral language skills. The programs are based on the hypothesis that oral language difficulties often arise from a rapid auditory temporal processing deficit that compromises the development of phonological…

Klinefelter (47,XXY) syndrome (KS), the most common form of sex-chromosomal aneuploidy, is characterized by physical, endocrinologic, and reproductive abnormalities. Individuals with KS also exhibit a cognitive/behavioral phenotype characterized by language and language-based learning disabilities and executive and attentional dysfunction in the…

Reviews studies that have explored interrelationships among linguistic components in children with language disorders and describes the controversy over the interpretation of these linguistic interrelationships. Explanations for the occurrence or absence of linguistic trade-offs, including limited capacity processing models, and the implications…

Connectionist (parallel distributed processing) modeling provides a new way to approach the neurological study of language. This method focuses on the interplay between a computational model and the appropriate neurological, neuropsychological, and speech and language data, couched in connectionist mechanisms that map naturally to what is known of…

Findings from a study in which twins were given tests of onward repetition and auditory processing are discussed. Children with specific language impairments were impaired on both measures, but deficits had different origins. Auditory processing problems showed no evidence of genetic influence, whereas the nonword repetition deficit was highly…

Discusses grammatical morpheme omissions in the phrase productions of children with language impairments. Clinical procedures are described whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts to enhance learning of grammatical…