Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems not only with language performance but also with sustained attention, which is the ability to maintain alertness over an extended period of time. Although there is consensus that this ability is impaired with respect to processing stimuli in the auditory perceptual…

Developing readers often make anagrammatical errors (e.g. misreading pirates as parties), suggesting they use letter position flexibly during word recognition. However, while it is widely assumed that the occurrence of these errors decreases with increases in reading skill, empirical evidence to support this distinction is lacking. Accordingly, we…

We examined the response to a phonics through spelling intervention for children with developmental dyslexia in word and pseudoword reading efficiency and word spelling. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent the response to the intervention is robust across different cognitive profiles (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and…

Proficient use of spatial terms such as "under," "to the left of" or "in front of" is a central component of daily communication and is important in the development of language and spatial cognition. Here we examine spatial language abilities in intellectually high-functioning individuals with autism spectrum…

Reading difficulties of children growing up in poverty contexts have not received as much attention as those of children from middle-income families. This paper analyzes the reading-related cognitive profiles of Argentine, Spanish-speaking, low-SES children with reading difficulties (RD), by comparing them with chronological age- (CA) and reading…

The present study examined oral language growth differences in a sample of 256 Greek-speaking children with and without literacy difficulties (LD), during the first two elementary grades. Measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were administered in both grades for the…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

We compared the effects of Lag 0 and Lag 1 schedules of reinforcement on children's responses naming category items in a group context and subsequent responses emitted during individual testing in which the schedule of reinforcement remained Lag 0. Specifically, we measured response variability and novel responses to categories for 3 children who…

Background: Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether…

Naming speed (NS) refers to how quickly and accurately participants name a set of familiar stimuli (e.g., letters). NS is an established predictor of reading ability, but controversy remains over why it is related to reading. We used three techniques (stimulus manipulations to emphasize phonological and/or visual aspects, decomposition of NS times…

The current meta-analysis synthesized findings from profiling research on Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). We reviewed a total of 81 studies published between 1964 and May 2015, representing a total of 9735 Chinese children. There are 982 effect sizes for the comparison between children with RD and age-matched typically developing…

Employing a large sample of children from Dutch regular elementary schools, this study assessed the contributing and discriminating values of reading disability (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to two types of phonological processing skills, phonemic awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). A second objective was…

Background: Many children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty recognizing and understanding emotions. However, the reasons for these difficulties are currently not well understood. Aims: To compare the…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…