This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

The long-term objective of this project was to better understand how shorter auditory experience and spectral degradation of the cochlear implant (CI) signal impact spoken language processing in deaf children with CIs. The specific objective of this research was to utilize psycholinguistic methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying observed…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

While semantic and syntactic properties of verb meaning can impact the success of verb learning at a single age, developmental changes in how these factors influence acquisition are largely unexplored. We ask whether the impact of syntactic and semantic properties on verb vocabulary development varies with age and language ability for toddlers…

Purpose: Toddlers with late language emergence have difficulty acquiring an object vocabulary that is well defined by shape early in development. Without object words, subsequent language growth is delayed. The current study tested an intervention scaffold that highlights object shape during word teaching so that toddlers with late language…

The main goal of this study was to ascertain the effectiveness of an intervention programme on narrative coherence in students with Typical Development (TD) and with a Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Participants were 99 five-year-old students from schools in Tenerife. A task involving retelling a story was used for the narrative analysis,…

Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in…

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25-month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early…

In this paper the author attempts to describe the actual linguistic problems of the retardates, compare their language with that of normal children and thereby tries to illustrate that although the language of retardates delay, they acquire language in the same sequence, as compared with the normal children. Three moderately retarded children with…

Background: Children who have reached the age of 2 years without having acquired a 50-word vocabulary and/or who use no word combinations are referred to in the literature as "Late Talkers". Research has not yet identified the factors that cause slow development of expressive language; in particular, relatively little research has been carried out…

An assessment battery, measuring multiple aspects of language, was administered to 29 children between 4 and 5 years of age who had been born prematurely. The children, who weighed less than 2,500 grams at birth after less than 37 weeks of gestation, were recruited from a cohort of children originally admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit…