The current study conducted a comparative analysis of the effects of select components of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, labeled praise, behavior descriptions, and reflections on child vocalizations in two children with autism spectrum disorder and accompanying language delays using a concurrent multiple baseline across participants design. The…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many schools were forced to interrupt in-person delivery of educational services and switched to delivery of instruction in a remote setting. The educational impacts of school closures and remote instructional delivery have become a concern for the impact on an entire generation of students. Although delivery of…

Categorical induction abilities are robust in typically developing (TD) preschoolers, while children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) frequently perform inconsistently on tasks asking for the transference of traits from a known category member to a new example based on shared category membership. Here, TD five-year-olds and six-year-olds with…

Amid growing controversy about the oft-cited "30-million-word gap," this investigation uses language data from five American communities across the socioeconomic spectrum to test, for the first time, Hart and Risley's (1995) claim that poor children hear 30 million fewer words than their middle-class counterparts during the early years…

Purpose: This longitudinal study compared the development of hand and index-finger pointing in children with typical language development (TD) and children with language delay (LD). First, we examined whether the number and the form of pointing gestures during the second year of life are potential indicators of later LD. Second, we analyzed the…

Background: The ability to generate words that follow certain constraints, or verbal fluency, is a sensitive indicator of neurocognitive impairment, and is impacted by a variety of variables. Aims: To investigate the effect of post-stroke aphasia, elicitation category and linguistic variables on verbal fluency performance. Methods &…

Purpose: This longitudinal study examined differences in the development of working memory (WM) between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. Further, it explored to what extent language at ages 7-8 years could be predicted by measures of language and/or WM at ages 4-5 years. Method: Thirty…

Existing studies have observed a robust relationship between infants' pointing gestures and language outcomes. By contrast, infants' overall vocal production is not related to language outcomes. One possible explanation for the association between pointing and language is that pointing gestures, as compared to vocalizations, may elicit more verbal…

Expressive language problems are common among children with Down syndrome (DS). In typically developing (TD) children, gestures play an important role in supporting the transition from one-word utterances to two-word utterances. As far as we know, an overview on the role of gestures to support expressive language development in children with DS is…

Interaction is a necessary condition for second language (L2) learning (Long, 1980, 1996). Research in computer-mediated communication has shown that interaction opportunities make learners pay attention to form in a variety of ways that promote L2 learning. This research has mostly investigated text-based rather than voice-based interaction. The…

Lexical access tasks are designed to measure efficiency of lexical access, but task demands and methods vary greatly. Many lexical access tasks do not account for confounding factors including competence in other linguistic abilities. In this study, preschoolers were given two lexical access tasks. In the single-category naming (SCN) task,…

Children with developmental disabilities benefit from their language environment as much as, or even more than, typically developing (TD) children, but maternal language directed to developmentally delayed children is an underinvestigated topic. The purposes of the present study were to compare maternal functional language directed to children…

The emergence of the Down syndrome (DS) behavioural phenotype during early development may be of great importance for early intervention. The main goal of this study was to investigate the good-imitator-poor-talker developmental profile in DS at preschool age. Twenty children with Down syndrome (DS; mean nonverbal mental age NMA 1 y10 m) and 15…

The study compared the vocal production and language learning environments of 26 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to 78 typically developing children using measures derived from automated vocal analysis. A digital language processor and audio-processing algorithms measured the amount of adult words to children and the amount of…

This study analysed the early linguistic development of Italian pre-term children. Samples of spontaneous pre-linguistic and verbal production were recorded at 12 and 18 months of age from two groups of children: 24 pre-term children and 15 full-term children. The Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Questionnaire was administered at 24 months…