Purpose: Prior work has found that "late talkers" (LTs) as a group continue to demonstrate lower language and reading outcomes compared to their typically developing (TD) peers even into young adulthood. Others identified that children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) show difficulties later with theory of mind (ToM)…

This article investigates the narrative skills of children acquiring Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Producing a narrative requires vocabulary, the ability to form sentences, and cognitive skills to construct actions in a logical order for the recipient to understand the story. Research has shown that narrative skills are an excellent way of…

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: Despite known motor and spoken language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the motor skills underlying speech production and their relationship with language skills have rarely been directly investigated in this population. Method: Thirty-nine autistic children (14 minimally verbal [MV], 25 verbal [V]) and 11 non-autistic…

This study evaluates the impact of a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tool for the acquisition of academic English and oral language skills in children learning English as a second language. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compare English proficiency scores for K-5 students who did or did not use the program during the 2020-21…

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…

Purposes: The effect of intervening on narrative skills in Chinese-speaking school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is underexplored. Methods: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of narrative intervention on written narratives of Chinese children with and without DLD and to explore the potential…

Research examining relations between language skills and social competence has yielded mixed findings. Three meta-analyses investigated links between language skills (overall, receptive, and expressive) and social competence in 2- to 12-year-old children. Data from 130 studies representing 62,120 children (M age at language assessment = 4.70…

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated the influences of child-based and parental factors on conversational latency in autistic children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 autistic children aged…

Background: Bilingual children are at risk for being misdiagnosed with developmental language disorders (DLD) because language tests in speech-language practice often fail to accommodate cultural and linguistic diversity. Evaluation of learning ability and modifiability during dynamic assessment may improve the diagnostic procedure for bilingual…

Background: Rapid naming refers to the duration required to swiftly and accurately identify a set of familiar visual stimuli. Rapid naming serves as a significant indicator of the efficiency with which phonological information can be retrieved from memory, playing a crucial role in the advancement of language and literacy competencies. Aim: This…

Objective: Pragmatics can be defined as the appropriate use of language in social interactions. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) exhibit difficulties in pragmatic language (PL), but the nature and sources of these difficulties have not been fully investigated yet. The purpose of…

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…

Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west…

This study tested the role of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)'s conversational expansion in mediating between mothers' descriptive language and children with ASD's conversational repair, and whether this mediation was moderated by the relative complexity of mother-child language. Videos of forty children with ASD engaging in various…