Purpose: This study investigates the acquisition of aspect markers by Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to typically developing aged-matched (TDA) children and typically developing younger (TDY) children through the aspect hypothesis (AH). Method: A sentence-picture matching task and a priming…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Purpose: This study examines the effect of age on language use with an automated analysis of digitized speech obtained from semistructured, narrative speech samples. Method: We examined the Cookie Theft picture descriptions produced by 37 older and 76 young healthy participants. Using modern natural language processing and automatic speech…

Purpose: The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with specific reading comprehension failure. Method: Two groups (ns = 15) of 9- to 10-year-olds participated. One group had age-appropriate word reading and reading comprehension; the other group had age-appropriate word reading but poor reading…

The current investigation explored understanding of idioms in context in 93 children with communication disorders and 39 age-matched peers. The clinical group was subdivided by (a) the presence of autistic features and (b) the presence of language impairment. Idiom definitions were gathered in isolation and in context. Related skills such as…

This paper describes various aspects of syntactic theory, including lexical, functional, and phrasal categories and how they are put together in clauses and sentences, how words are represented in the mental lexicon, and how noun phrases are assigned structural and semantic information. Language acquisition and the treatment of language disorders…