Children with autism spectrum disorder often have significant language delays. But do they learn language differently than neurotypical toddlers? We compared the lexical skills of 64 preverbal and minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder to 461 vocabulary-size-matched typically developing toddlers. We also examined social features…

Background: There is empirical evidence that a developmental language disorder (DLD) in early childhood leads to behaviour problems. However, it is still not clear how changes in language proficiency in these children influence the presence of behaviour problems. Aims: The aim of this study is to examine if changes in language proficiency are…

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…

Purpose: Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes.…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

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,…

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24-32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop…

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…

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…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

Purpose: Language is a multidimensional construct from prior to the beginning of formal schooling to near the end of elementary school. The primary goals of this study were to identify the dimensionality of language and to determine whether this dimensionality was consistent in children with typical language development from preschool through 5th…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

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…

Purpose: This research explored syntactic growth in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) over a 5-year period, and variability in growth in relation to autism symptoms, nonverbal cognition, maternal responsivity, and gender. Method: Language samples at 4 time points from 39 children with FXS, 31 boys and 8 girls, were analyzed using the Index of…