Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a self-administered naming treatment for one individual, B.N., presenting with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Method: Naming treatment included components of Lexical Retrieval Cascade Treatment and was…

Purpose: The first purpose of this study was to investigate how children's knowledge of taught words and transfer words assessed 10 months after a morphological vocabulary intervention can be predicted by means of language measures taken before the intervention. The second purpose was to investigate whether and how immediate post-intervention…

Purpose: Sign language, like spoken language, incorporates phonological and articulatory (or motor) processing components. Thus, the learning of novel signs, like novel spoken word forms, may be problematic for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In the present work, we hypothesize that phonological and articulatory deficits in…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to determine the ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to infer word class and meaning from text and to document variations by word class (noun, verb, adjective) and modality (listening, reading). We also asked whether the children could integrate global cues across the entire passage as…

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use…

Purpose: Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes.…

According to prediction-based learning theories, erroneous predictions support learning. However, empirical evidence for a relation between prediction error and children's language learning is currently lacking. Here we investigated whether and how prediction errors influence children's learning of novel words. We hypothesized that word learning…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…

This study examines whether an e-book with a dictionary could support parents' mediation of new words during shared book reading, more than the child's independent reading of an e-book with and without a dictionary. The participants included 128 kindergartners and 64 mothers who were randomly divided into four groups: independent reading of the…

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine cognitive flexibility for semantic and perceptual information in preschool children who stutter (CWS) and who do not stutter (CWNS). Method: Participants were 44 CWS and 44 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). Cognitive flexibility was measured using semantic and perceptual…

Purpose: When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as "specific language impairment") produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel…