Purpose: Differences across language environments of prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) may affect language acquisition; yet, whether mothers show individual differences in how they modify infant-directed (ID) compared with adult-directed (AD) speech has seldom been studied. This study assessed individual differences in…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate many mechanisms of lexical acquisition that support language in typical development; however, 1 notable exception is the shape bias. The bases of these children's difficulties with the shape bias are not well understood, and the current study explored potential sources of individual…

Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

Objective: Identifying which preterm children (PT) are at increased risk for language and learning differences increases opportunities for participation in interventions that improve outcomes. Speed in spoken language comprehension at early stages of language development requires information processing skills that may form the foundation for later…

The aim of the present study was to analyze the relative influence of age at implantation, parental expansions, and child language internal factors on grammatical progress in children with cochlear implants (CI). Data analyses used two longitudinal corpora of spontaneous speech samples, one with twenty-two and one with twenty-six children,…

Purpose: This research explored syntactic growth in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) over a 5-year period, and variability in growth in relation to autism symptoms, nonverbal cognition, maternal responsivity, and gender. Method: Language samples at 4 time points from 39 children with FXS, 31 boys and 8 girls, were analyzed using the Index of…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether individual differences in at-risk 4th graders' language comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, concept formation, working memory, and use of decimal labels (i.e., place value, point, incorrect place value, incorrect fraction, or whole number) are related to their decimal magnitude understanding.…

Although the research literature regarding language growth trajectories is burgeoning, the shape and direction of English Language Learners' (ELLs) language growth trajectories are largely not known. This study used growth curve modeling to determine the shape of ELLs' language growth trajectories across 12,248 oral narrative language samples…

Although statistical learning and language have been assumed to be intertwined, this theoretical presupposition has rarely been tested empirically. The present study investigates the relationship between statistical learning and language using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered…

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence…

Individual differences in child temperament have been associated with individual differences in language development. Similarly, relationships have been reported between early nonverbal social communication (joint attention) and both temperament and language. The present study examined whether individual differences in joint attention might…

Results of a statistical study of language in 30 infants suggest that two acquisition styles (nominal/pronominal and referential/expressive) are developing in parallel. Only for children heavily emphasizing one strategy can a distinctive style be determined. Results at 20 months were only partially predictive of performance at 28 months. (MSE)

Two studies compared the relative effectiveness of a developmentally based language facilitation program, a direct language facilitation program, or a combined developmental/direct program for 52 preschool children with disabilities. Both studies indicated that no program was better overall. Differential effects of the interventions could be…

The role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity were examined as determinants of pronoun reversal (I/you). It is proposed that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deicitic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing…