Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. Method: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social--emotional development, were identified as typical…

Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

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…

Purpose: Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic…

Purpose: This study investigates how the variables of culture and hearing status might influence the amount of parent-child talk families engage in throughout an average day. Method: Seventeen Vietnamese and 8 Canadian families of children with hearing loss and 17 Vietnamese and 13 Canadian families with typically hearing children between the ages…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to improve standardized language assessments among bilingual toddlers by investigating and removing the effects of bias due to unfamiliarity with cultural norms or a distributed language system. Method: The Expressive and Receptive Bayley-III language scales were adapted for use in a multilingual country…

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…