Purpose: Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) often struggle with forming early representations for phonemes and words, which could impact their speech production as well as their lexical access. This difficulty may limit their ability to accurately identify nonexemplar productions of words, such as developmental misarticulations produced…

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…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting…

Background and aims: A substantial minority of autistic individuals score within typical ranges on standard language tests, suggesting that autism does not necessarily affect language acquisition. This idea is reflected in current diagnostic criteria for autism, wherein language impairment is no longer included. However, some work has suggested…

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…

Purpose: As evidenced by perceptual learning studies involving adult listeners and speakers with dysarthria, adaptation to dysarthric speech is driven by signal predictability (speaker property) and a flexible speech perception system (listener property). Here, we extend adaptation investigations to adolescent populations and examine whether adult…

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…

The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to "measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level". Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted changes to child assessment procedures in schools such as the use of face masks by assessors. Research with adults suggests that face masks diminish performance on speech processing and comprehension tasks, yet little is known about how assessor masking affects child performance. Therefore, we…

Purpose: Contemporary motor theories indicate that well-practiced movements are best performed automatically, without conscious attention or monitoring. We applied this perspective to speech production in school-age children and examined how dual-task conditions that engaged sustained attention affected speech fluency, speech rate, and language…

Introduction: Children born prematurely often score lower on standardized tests of language in early childhood. Less is known about longer term outcomes. This investigation considered language outcomes in pre-adolescent children born very preterm/very low birthweight, as assessed by both standardized test scores and language sample measures, and…

A cluster randomized design was used to investigate the effects of the "Story Friends" vocabulary curriculum on learning of 84 preschoolers in 24 classrooms who were at risk for language difficulties. Children in the treatment condition received explicit vocabulary instruction of 36 words during small-group storybook listening centers…

The Simple View of Reading (SVR), which posits that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension, has been studied extensively with school-age readers. However, little is known about the intricacies of the SVR for adults who struggle with reading. This study addresses notable gaps in this literature, including the…