Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following…

Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, is considered a domain-general building block for typical language development. We compared 55 verbal children with autism (ASD, 6-12 years) and 50 typically-developing children in four SL tasks. The ASD group exhibited reduced learning in the linguistic SL…

Speech exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities at multiple timescales, which seem to be crucial to comprehension. Both children's ability to extract rhythm from complex stimuli and to produce rhythmic patterns are known to undergo changes from infancy to adulthood. However, it remains unclear what rhythm skills specifically related to speech look…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

Background: Early identification and intervention for hearing loss is important for supporting language development. Despite this, parents are required to overcome barriers to access hearing assessments for their children. Aims: To identify the enablers and barriers to accessing hearing assessments for Australian children identified by their…

Caregiver coaching is a common component of early intervention services, but providers may be unfamiliar with methods of coaching for families of children who are Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). This article provides guidance for early interventionists to implement caregiver coaching to facilitate language development in their children who are DHH.…

Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast, the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually…

Purpose: It is widely acknowledged that parental input plays an important role in typical language development. Less is known about the input provided to children with (suspected) developmental language disorder (DLD) or those at risk for DLD. These children may not benefit from parental input in the same way as their typically developing peers,…

Narrative language samples can be used to measure language development in children, but research on narrative development in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children is scarce, limiting knowledge of developmental stages and best practices for collection and analysis. This scoping review included 39 articles that explored recent methodologies and…

Supporting pupils' development regarding subject knowledge and disciplinary literacy is a complex and challenging task for teachers. Research shows that language-integrated physical education (PE) can assist children's language development. However, it tends to reduce the time for physical activity, which is problematic since youth's physical…

Purpose: Response times (RTs) are commonly used in studying language acquisition. However, previous research utilizing RT in the context of language has largely overlooked the intra-individual variability (IIV) of RTs, which could hold significant information about the processes underlying language acquisition. Method: We explored the association…

Objective: Pragmatics can be defined as the appropriate use of language in social interactions. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) exhibit difficulties in pragmatic language (PL), but the nature and sources of these difficulties have not been fully investigated yet. The purpose of…

Blind adults display language-specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in "co-speech gesture"--gesturing with speech--but not in "silent gesture"--gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult-like…