Purpose: The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) is a technological tool designed for comprehensive recordings and automated analysis of young children's daily language and auditory environments. LENA recordings play a crucial role in both clinical interventions and research, offering insights into the amount of spoken language children are…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object)…

Purpose: Cross-situational statistical learning is one mechanism by which typically developing toddlers map words to referents. Yet, this type of statistical learning has been found less efficient in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The purpose of this article is to evaluate cross-situational statistical learning in very young…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine parent-reported ratings of temperament in toddlers with and without prelingual hearing loss. Method: The parent-completed Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) was used to assess temperament in toddlers aged 18-36 months. Three dimensions of temperament were examined: surgency, negative…

Purpose: The present study explored the extent to which early prelinguistic communication skills predict expressive language in toddlers with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism), who are known to be at high likelihood for autism and language disorder, and a comparison group of toddlers with non-autistic older siblings (Sibs-NA). Method: Participants…

Purpose: The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) technology uses automated speech processing (ASP) algorithms to estimate counts such as total adult words and child vocalizations, which helps understand children's early language environment. This ASP has been validated in North American English and other languages in predominantly monolingual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine if 2.5-year-olds with language delay would learn verbs ("spill") when presented with varying syntactic structure ("The woman is spilling the milk"/"The milk is spilling"; "milk" = patient or theme) in a therapeutic context. Children with language delay have…

Purpose: The goal of this study is to examine how shyness affects a child's performance on language assessments that vary in sociability. We hypothesized that accuracy on language tasks would be driven by shyness such that shyer children would perform better on nonsociable tasks compared to sociable tasks. Method: The procedures followed a…

Purpose: This study aims to help researchers design observational measurement systems that yield sufficiently stable scores for estimating caregiver talk among caregivers of infant siblings of autistic and non-autistic children. Stable estimates minimize error introduced by facets of the measurement system, such as variability between coders or…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the construct validity of three sentence-focused diversity measures, intransitive verb diversity, transitive verb diversity, and third person (3P) subject diversity, using two methods: (a) group differentiation of late-talking (LT) toddlers from peers with typically developing (TD) language and…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to (a) provide an updated review of the literature pertaining to proposed early features of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), (b) discuss the findings of recent treatment studies of infants and toddlers with suspected CAS (sCAS), and (c) present evidence-based strategies and tools that can be used for the…

Purpose: The goal of this work was to examine the semantic and syntactic properties of the vocabularies of autistic and non-autistic infants and toddlers to see if children in these two groups know different kinds of words. We focused on both receptive and expressive vocabularies. For expressive vocabulary, we looked only at the "active"…

Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. Method: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social--emotional development, were identified as typical…

Purpose: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. Method: One hundred nine children were recorded…

Purpose: Babble Boot Camp (BBC) is a parent-implemented telepractice intervention for infants at risk for speech and language disorders. BBC uses a teach-model-coach-review approach, delivered through weekly 15-min virtual meetings with a speech-language pathologist. We discuss accommodations needed for successful virtual follow-up test…