Purpose: In spite of improvements in language outcomes for children with hearing loss (HL) arising from cochlear implants (CIs), these children can falter when it comes to academic achievement, especially in higher grades. Given that writing becomes increasingly relevant to educational pursuits as children progress through school, this study…

The present study aims to examine the contribution of cognitive flexibility to metalinguistic skills and reading comprehension during primary school years. Forty-nine third-grade primary school children completed the measures of cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic skills including syntactic awareness (word order knowledge), morphosyntactic skill…

This study investigates the relationships among working memory (WM), syntactic parsing ability (SP), and L2 reading performance across varying proficiency levels. A cohort of 120 L1-Persian EFL learners was categorized into beginner, intermediate, and advanced proficiency groups based on their IELTS scores. Participants completed a reading span…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., "*£5 was cost by the book"), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is…

In response to questions in which a "wh"-term interacts with a universal quantifier in object position, such as "Who picked every toy?," children as old as 5 years of age often provide a list, pairing toys with the people who picked each of them. This response pattern is unexpected, it has been claimed, because children appear…

This article examines Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a relatively new treatment approach for anomia in people with aphasia. The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs, sentence production,…

Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reading comprehension difficulties, but the level of processing at which comprehension is most vulnerable and the influence of language phenotype on comprehension skill is currently unclear. We explored comprehension at sentence and passage levels across language phenotypes. Children with ASD…

Purpose: This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method: Sixty-five children (6- to…

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined…