Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

There is a well-documented association between developmental language disorder (DLD) and executive function (EF) deficits. These co-occurring deficits pose risks to students' short- and long-term academic and social outcomes. In the United States, school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are tasked to ensure that students with DLD are able…

Background: The role of domain-general short-term memory (STM) in language development remains controversial. A previous finding from the HelSLI study on children with developmental language disorder (DLD) suggested that not only verbal but also non-verbal STM for temporal order is related to language acquisition in monolingual children with DLD.…

Purpose: Little is known about the specific nature of language abilities of autistic adolescents and young adults with language impairment (LI), limiting our knowledge of developmental trajectories and ability to develop efficacious speech/language supports. An important first step is establishing proof of concept of identification of LI in this…

Purpose: Working memory and linguistic knowledge are highly intertwined in language tasks. Verbal working memory in particular has been studied as a potential constraint on language performance. This, in turn, highlights the need for a clinical assessment tool that will assist clinicians in understanding individual children's performance in…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between executive functioning and word learning among preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Forty-one preschool-age children with DLD were matched to typically developing children on age and sex. Participants were exposed to 10 novel…

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…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare the verbal and nonverbal cognitive profiles of children with specific language impairment (SLI) with problems predominantly in expressive (SLI-E) or receptive (SLI-R) language skills. These diagnostic subgroups have not been compared before in psychological studies. Method: Participants were…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often experience word-learning difficulties, which are suggested to originate in the early stage of word learning: fast mapping. Some previous research indicates significantly poorer fast mapping capabilities in children with SLI compared with typically developing (TD) counterparts, with…

Forty native Spanish-speaking children (age 8;0-10;3), 20 with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 with Typical Language Development (TLD), received a battery of psycholinguistic tests, IQ, hearing screenings, and the Spanish Non-word Repetition Task (NRT). The children's repetition of 20 non-words was scored. The percentage of correct…

This work has two objectives. First of all, to offer psychometric instruments that help more precisely identify and differentiate children with specific language impairment (SLI) in the educational field and, secondly, to establish profiles of the two cases that illustrate the two current subtypes of SLI: phonologic-syntactic SLI and…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (CwSLI) are consistently reported to have short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) difficulties. Aim: To compare STM and WM abilities in CwSLI with children with pragmatic language impairment (CwPLI). Methods & Procedures: Primary school-aged CwSLI (n = 12) and CwPLI (n = 23) were…

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…

The most common interventions for children with lexical disorders are forms and combinations of interventions focusing on phonological and semantic elaboration and retrieval. Systematic reviews of intervention studies on children with lexical disorders show that a significant generalization of therapeutic effects to untrained vocabulary was rarely…