Children's idiom comprehension is an important aspect of language development. Idioms have both literal and figurative meanings, and there are often great differences between literal meaning and figurative meaning, which brings great difficulties to children's accurate understanding of idioms. As a kind of underlying language ability,…

This study used a prospective community-based sample to describe patterns and predictors of language development from 4 to 7 years in verbal children (IQ = 70) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 26-27). Children with typical language (TD; n = 858-861) and language impairment (LI; n = 119) were used for comparison. Children with ASD and LI had…

Background: High levels of behaviour problems are found in children with language impairments, but less is known about the level and nature of language impairment in children with severe behavioural problems. In particular, previous data suggest that at primary age, receptive impairments are more closely related to behaviour problems, whereas…

A study examined the role of intelligence in the definition of reading disabilities in languages with different orthographic systems. The study included 94 Spanish children and 157 English-speaking Canadian children and found significant differences between the languages when reading performances was analyzed as a function of verbal IQ scores.…

Patterns of speech from lower socioeconomic status mothers to their infants were analyzed to determine correlations with infant risk of mental retardation. Measures of maternal language included sentence form, amount of speech, and syntactic complexity. The proportion of imperatives was positively correlated with risk status and negatively…