Despite the importance of identifying children with developmental language delay, no accurate screening instruments are available for 3-year-olds. The aim of the present study is to compare the accuracy of the General Language Screen (GLS), focusing on receptive and expressive language and intelligibility with the accuracy of the VTO Language…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have problems acquiring language, affecting their communicative participation, social--emotional functioning (SEF) and quality of life (QoL). Aims: To investigate whether communicative participation mediates the relation between language and SEF and QoL. Methods & Procedures: In a…

Background: Difficulties in language development are related to social and emotional problems, lower academic outcomes, and lower quality of life from childhood to adolescence. These grave consequences might be significantly reduced by timely identification and professional support. The introduction of systematic screening for language delay (LD)…

Word segmentation is a fundamental aspect of language learning, since identification of word boundaries in continuous speech must occur before the acquisition of word meanings can take place. We previously used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to statistical and…

Purpose: We investigated and compared the outcomes from two standardized, norm-referenced screening assessments of language (i.e., Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool--Second Edition [CELFP-2], Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation--Screening Test [DELV-ST]) with African American preschoolers whose spoken dialect differed…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…

This study investigated the classification accuracy of the "Dynamic Indicators of Vocabulary Skills" (DIVS) as a preschool vocabulary screening measure. With a sample of 240 preschoolers, fall and winter DIVS scores were used to predict year-end vocabulary risk using the 25th percentile on the "Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Third…

Socio-emotional development is increasingly recognised as playing a central role in children's academic achievement. However, little is known about the socio-emotional development of language-minority children on entry to school and how these children fare in comparison to their language-majority peers. To address this gap, longitudinal data on…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

The investigators compared two techniques for teaching expressive vocabulary to late talkers: modeling with an expectant pause and modeling with an evoked child production. They also explored the influence of neighborhood density on children's real word learning. Three late talkers (ages 25-33 months) received two alternating vocabulary treatments…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to describe differences in the narratives produced by 3-, 4-, and 5- year old Spanish-speaking (SS) children. Narrative productions of 104 typically developing children were collected using a story-retelling task and coded using the Index of Narrative Complexity. The results of this study indicate…

This study examined single-word code-mixing produced by bilingual preschoolers in order to better understand lexical choice patterns in each language. Analysis included item-level code-mixed responses of 606 five-year-old children. Per parent report, children were separated by language dominance based on language exposure and use. Children were…

This article reports on a 4-year follow-up study from the Learning Experiences and Alternative Program for Preschoolers and Their Parents (LEAP) randomized trial of early intervention for young children with autism. Overall, participants from LEAP classes were marginally superior to comparison class children on elementary school outcomes specific…

We examined the ability of four American screening tests to identify preschool-age Canadian children with language delays. At 54 months, 110 children from five Ontario infant and child development programs completed the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, Battelle Developmental Inventory Screening Test, Brigance Preschool Screen, and Early Screening…