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'…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

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: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is defined by persistent difficulties with language, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it is also associated with domain-general and nonverbal information-processing deficits. However, the interconnections between cognitive functions, both nonverbal and language related, are still unclear.…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

Previous word learning studies suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder may have difficulty understanding pictorial symbols. Here we investigate the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder and language-matched typically developing children to contextualize symbolic information communicated by pictures in a search task that did…

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…

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…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

Purpose: The authors investigated expressive and receptive intonation abilities in children with Williams syndrome (WS) and the relation of these abilities to other linguistic abilities. Method: Fourteen children with WS, 14 typically developing children matched to the WS group for receptive language (LA), and 15 typically developing children…

Background: Narratives have been used by a number of researchers to investigate the language of children with specific language impairment (SLI). While a number of explanations for SLI have been proposed, there is now mounting evidence that children with SLI have limited memory resources. Phonological memory has been the focus of the research on…

This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4-6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of…

This case study of a preadolescent boy with severe expressive and receptive language impairments illustrates treatment focused on the functional limitations on the child's daily academic activities and social participation. Treatment goals incorporated language comprehension objectives into the student's reading program and language use objectives…

This article compared the language profiles of adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) and children with specific language impairment matched for nonverbal cognitive ability, and investigated whether similar relationships could be established between language measures and other capacities in both groups. Language profiles were very similar: Expressive…