Background: Children born with cleft palate ± lip (CP ± L) are at risk of speech sound disorder (SSD). Up to 40% continue to have SSD at age 5-6 years. These difficulties are typically described as articulatory in nature and often include cleft speech characteristics (CSC) hypothesized to result from structural differences. In non-CP ± L SSD…

The current diagnostic criteria for the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) include the possibility to specify concomitant language difficulties. Purpose: Our main aim was to explore whether children with ASD-Level 1 (ASD-L1) present difficulties in the acquisition of structural language, as little work has been done in this regard so far. As a…

In this study, a narrative-based language intervention (NBLI) is evaluated in children with HL based on selected narrative outcome measures important for telling and retelling stories. Nine Danish children with slight to severe sensorineural HL in the age range of 4;11-8;8 years participated. The study had a single-arm early efficacy design. The…

Purpose: Individuals with proximal 16p11.2 copy number variants (CNVs), either deletions (16p11.2DS) or duplications (16p11.2Dup), are predisposed to neurodevelopmental difficulties and disorders, such as language disorders, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorder. The purpose of the current study was to characterize language…

Purpose: Many child-, hearing-, and device-related factors contribute to spoken language outcomes in children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Recently, the family environment has been implicated as another contributing factor in language development. However, most studies on the role of families in language outcomes of children who are DHH…

Purpose: Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e., precocious) relative to peers of their age. In this study, we explored the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between parent concerns about children's oral language, reading, and related skills and their children's performance on standardized assessments of language and reading, with a particular focus on whether those relationships differed between children recruited for in-school versus…

Background: There is no sufficiently accurate short-language measure that could be used by speech-language pathologists, teachers or paraprofessionals to screen young school-aged children to identify those requiring in-depth language evaluations. This may be due to poor development of the available measures, which have omitted crucial test…

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…

The current study was designed to determine whether classroom quality (i.e., the quality of teacher--child interactions) served as a mediator of peer effects with respect to preschool children's gain in language skills over an academic year. Participants were 670 preschool-age children (64.6% boys; "M" = 4 years, 4 months, "SD"…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Purpose: The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children. Method: The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index…

This study applied multilevel modeling to examine the relationship between the percentage of children with mild/moderate disabilities in classrooms and children's language and literacy achievement over an academic year. The sample included 516 preschool children (mean age = 52.3 months, SD = 6.3) in 75 classrooms; 42% of the children had…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD), an unexplained problem using and understanding spoken language, has been hypothesized to have an underlying auditory processing component. Auditory feedback plays a key role in speech motor control. The current study examined whether auditory feedback is used to regulate speech production in a…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…