Background: Accurate and meaningful assessment of language and communication skills to monitor child progress is the cornerstone to appropriate intervention for children with complex communication needs (CCN; Brady et al., 2016; Rowland et al., 2012). Despite this need, there is a lack of high quality and validated measurement of young children…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

Purpose: This work describes community-based participatory research (CBPR) to support language and literacy development with Pre-K and kindergarten African American boys. Method: The aim and goals of the project were designed using the CBPR model. Interventionists were trained with researcher-designed videos. Interventionist fidelity to training…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

The lack of early identification, suboptimal language stimulation and limited remedial services in Sri Lanka for children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing place them at-risk of language delay. The reality for many preschool and primary school children entering formal education in Sri Lanka is a language delay in spoken language and/or sign language…

Background: Late language emergence is a risk indicator for developmental language disorder. Parent-implemented early language intervention programmes (parent programmes) have been shown to have positive effects on children's receptive and expressive language skills. However, long-term effectiveness has rarely been studied. Additionally, little is…

A systematic review of research on the effects of interventions that include communication partner modeling of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) on the language acquisition of individuals with complex communication needs was conducted. Included studies incorporated AAC modeling as a primary component of the intervention,…

Purpose: Pragmatic language difficulties have been documented as part of the FMR1 premutation phenotype, yet the interplay between these features in mothers and the language outcomes of their children with fragile X syndrome is unknown. This study aimed to determine whether pragmatic language difficulties in mothers with the "FMR1"…

Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy's effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre--post-test design, the programme's impacts were compared with a control group…

This study taught the passive to two children with specific language impairment (aged 8;1 and 8;2). It employed usage-based principles including "constructional grounding"; using short structures as the basis for acquiring long structures, and "construction conspiracy"; encouraging analogies between partially overlapping…

This article reports on the development and preliminary implementation trials of a modular small-group intervention targeting syntax and vocabulary for children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties in grades prekindergarten through first. The intervention, delivered by trained paraprofessionals, included 12 weeks of 20-minute…

Purpose: The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of…

A meta-analysis was carried out of interventions for children with primary developmental speech and language delays/disorders. The data were categorized depending on the control group used in the study (no treatment, general stimulation, or routine speech and language therapy) and were considered in terms of the effects of intervention on…

The paper reports on a study of the rate of language learning of 12 children aged 2 to 10 with severe to profound bilateral hearing losses. Intended to help deaf children learn spoken language at the same rate as average hearing Ss, the intervention stressed three qualities of linguistic information: (1) clarity, (2) appropriateness, and (3)…