We explored associations among the core behavioural features and developmental/cognitive abilities of 155 autistic children, assessed between ages 13-67 months and again around 1-year later to understand predictive directionality. Bidirectional, cross-domain association was apparent, albeit with stronger direction of effect from earlier cognition…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a lifelong condition associated with poorer outcomes than neurotypical peers, yet relatively little is known about long-term quality of life in DLD. This preliminary study adopts a neurodiversity-informed approach by exploring "self-reported" quality of life in an adolescent and young…

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that individual differences in declarative memory may be an important predictor of second language (L2) abilities. However, the evidence comes from studies using different declarative memory tasks that vary in their reliance on verbal abilities and task demands, which preclude estimating the size of the…

This study examined the independent contribution of morphological awareness and orthographic awareness in reading comprehension, controlling for working memory and reading fluency in Arabic-speaking children. Participants (N = 244) from grades four and five, were classified into typical comprehenders (n = 207) and poor comprehenders (n = 37). All…

Child temperament is a predictor of non-verbal ability (i.e. thinking and problem-solving skills that do not fundamentally require verbal language production and comprehension). Given that temperament scores might vary depending on whether the reporter is a parent or a teacher, this study analyses (a) whether those reports are different and (b)…

Purpose: The current study addresses a gap in the literature regarding syntactic development of adolescent boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Down syndrome (DS). Specifically, we ask whether syntactic skills plateau or continue to change during adolescence for these groups and whether the profile of syntactic change differs between boys with…

Background: Despite accumulated evidence that language development depends on basic cognitive processes, the balance in contributions of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills to language abilities is still underexplored. Little is known about which cognitive measures best predict the degree of severity in children with language disorder (LD).…

Aspects of the preschool home learning environment which may foster reading development have been identified, although their relationships with spelling and writing remain unclear. The present study explored associations between the preschool home literacy environment (HLE), language and nonverbal abilities and children's spelling and writing…

The purpose of the present research was to comprehensively assess the language abilities of Russian primary-school-aged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), varying in non-verbal IQ, at all linguistic levels (phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, and discourse) in production and comprehension. Yet, the influence of such non-language factors…

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal…

Background & aims: Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and…

To explore the roles of character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic awareness in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students' reading fluency, 52 Chinese DHH students (mean age = 13.29 years) in elementary school participated in the present study. The results showed that character recognition, expressive vocabulary, and syntactic…

This study characterized the rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adolescent and young adult males with fragile X syndrome (FXS) using a multi-method approach integrating a DSM-based parent interview (Children's Interview for Psychiatric Syndromes; P-ChIPS, Fristad et al., 1998) and a parent rating scale (Child Behavior…

Predictors of expressive grammar were compared in formal and naturalistic assessment tasks for children with typically developing (TD) language and with Developmental Langauge Disorder (DLD). Standardized expressive language assessments were administered to 110 preschoolers. The parents of these children reported whether or not they were concerned…

The present study examines the concurrent relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary breadth and depth after accounting for the effect of other potential contributors. A sample of French-speaking fourth-grade children who spoke either French at home (L1) (n = 55) or another language (L2) (n = 85) completed a number of tests…