Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

Twenty-five children with specific language impairment (SLI; age 5 years, 3 months [5;3]-8;2), 50 typically developing children (3;3-8;2), and 31 normal adults participated in three eye-tracking experiments of spoken language comprehension that were designed to investigate the use of verb information during real-time sentence comprehension in…

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun-noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the…

The few studies that have investigated emotion labeling in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have generally focused on global identification performances and appear contradictory. The current study is a fine-grained examination of how children with SLI and typical peers differ in the accuracy of their emotional lexicon use. Children…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…

Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…