Purpose: There are strong retention benefits when learners frequently test themselves during the learning period. This practice of repeated retrieval has recently been applied successfully to children's word learning. In this study, we apply a repeated retrieval procedure to the learning of novel adjectives by preschool-age children with…

Purpose: Recent findings in preschool children indicated novel adjective recall was enhanced when learned using repeated retrieval with contextual reinstatement (RRCR) compared to repeated study (RS). Recall was similar for learned pictures used during training and new (generalized) pictures with the same adjective features. The current study…

Purpose: Retrieval practice has been found to be a powerful strategy to enhance long-term retention of new information; however, the utility of retrieval practice when teaching young children new words is largely unknown, and even less is known for young children with language impairments. The current study examined the effect of 2 different…

Purpose: Recent behavioral studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing retrieval practice into learning tasks for children. Such approaches have revealed that repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) is particularly effective in promoting children's learning of word form and meaning information. This study further examines how retrieval…

Previous studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 TD children matched for age, and 21 TD children matched for receptive vocabulary…

This study examines whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) acquiring a language with a rich case marking system (Hungarian) have difficulty with case, and, if so, whether the difficulty is comparable for spatial and nonspatial meanings. Data were drawn from narrative samples and from a sentence repetition task. Suffixes were…

I commend Johanne Paradis not only for her interesting Keynote Article but also for the careful research that she has conducted along with her collaborators in the area of bilingual language development and disorders. Her contributions have been significant and are sure to shape our theoretical as well as clinical understanding of specific…

Purpose: Although conversational recasting has been a generally successful treatment approach, the precise factors that influence children's learning through recasts are not yet understood. In this study, we examined details of the relationship between child utterance and clinician utterance that seemed likely to influence learning. Method: Three…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

Purpose: To propose that the diagnostic category of "expressive language disorder" as distinct from a disorder of both expressive and receptive language might not be accurate. Method: Evidence that casts doubt on a pure form of this disorder is reviewed from several sources, including the literature on genetic findings, theories of language…

Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, "decide," that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task…

Current theories of specific language impairment (SLI) in children fall into 2 general classes: those that attribute SLI to processing limitations and those that attribute the disorder to deficits in grammatical knowledge. In this study, the authors examined children's comprehension of subject and object "Wh"-questions because they offer the means…

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself. Method: Fourteen-year-old…

Purpose: This study reports the findings of an investigation designed to examine the effects of acoustic enhancement on the processing of low-phonetic-substance inflections (e.g., 3rd-person singular "-s," possessive "-s") versus a high-phonetic-substance inflection (e.g., present progressive "-ing") by children with specific language impairment…

Describes an unusual phonological pattern exhibited by a child aged two years that involves the production of word-final strident continuants in words whose adult forms contain these features in initial, rather than final, position (e.g., ops for soap). (13 references) (GLR)