Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

Background: Children's language abilities set the stage for their education, psychosocial development and life chances across the life course. Aims: To compare the efficacy of two preschool language interventions delivered with low dosages in early years settings (EYS): Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST) and an Adapted Derbyshire Language…

Purpose: The study explored longitudinally the course of vocabulary and general language development in a group of infants with Down syndrome (DS) compared to a group of typically developing (TD) infants matched on nonverbal mental ability (NVMA). Method: We compared the vocabulary and general language trajectories of the two groups in two ways:…

Background: Early and effective treatment for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is important. Although a growing body of research shows the effects of interventions at the group level, clinicians observe large individual differences in language growth, and differences in outcomes across language domains. A systematic…

This study compared pronoun use in individuals with autism to their typically developing peers via meta-analysis and systematic review of 20 selected articles to examine differences in overall pronoun usage as well as in personal, ambiguous, possessive, reflexive, and clitic pronoun usage. Summary effects indicated significant differences between…

This study examined the extent to which a discrepant comprehension-production profile (i.e., relatively more delayed comprehension than production) is characteristic of the early language phenotype in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and tracked the developmental progression of the profile. Our findings indicated that a discrepant…

Purpose: Both theoretical models of infant language acquisition and empirical studies posit important roles for attention to speech in early language development. However, deaf infants with cochlear implants (CIs) show reduced attention to speech as compared with their peers with normal hearing (NH; Horn, Davis, Pisoni, & Miyamoto, 2005;…

Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do…

Little is known about early language development in infants who later develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We analyzed prospective data from 346 infants, some of whom were at high risk for developing ASD, to determine if language differences could be detected at 12 months of age in the infants who later were diagnosed with ASD. Analyses…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

This study aimed to examine which genres parents are reading to children and for themselves. Furthermore, it aimed to examine mothers' and fathers' shared reading strategies for different book genres in relation to children's language and literacy development. Parents shared a narrative and an expository book with their preschool-aged children.…

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…

Background: Although many children with Down syndrome experience hearing loss, there has been little research to investigate its impact on speech and language development. Studies that have investigated the association give inconsistent results. These have often been based on samples where children with the most severe hearing impairments have…

Using the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, language comprehension and production were compared in a sample of 101,250 children aged 2 ; 00 to 9 ; 11 and a focus subsample of 38,845 children aged 2 ; 00 to 4 ; 11 from sixteen under-researched developing nations. In the whole sample, comprehension slightly exceeded production; correlations between…