Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have well-documented verb learning difficulties. In this study, we asked whether the inclusion of retrieval practice during the learning period would facilitate these children's verb learning relative to a similar procedure that provided no retrieval opportunities. Method: Eleven…

This study employed a paired priming paradigm to ask whether input features influence a child's propensity to use non-nominative versus nominative case in subject position, and to use non-nominative forms even when verbs are marked for agreement. Thirty English-speaking children (ages 2;6 to 3;7) heard sentences with pronouns that had…

Purpose: Retrieval practice has been found to be a powerful strategy to enhance long-term retention of new information; however, the utility of retrieval practice when teaching young children new words is largely unknown, and even less is known for young children with language impairments. The current study examined the effect of 2 different…

Delayed appearance of early language milestones can be one of the first signs of a developmental disorder. In this study, we investigated how well late acquisition of language milestones predicted an outcome of specific language impairment (SLI). The sample included 150 children (76 SLI), aged 4 to 7 years old. Milestone information was collected…

Purpose: To examine the role of linguistic input in how young, typically developing children use the 3rd person singular -"s" (3S) inflection. Method: Novel verbs were presented to 16 young children in either 3S contexts (e.g., "The tiger heens") or nonfinite (NF) contexts (e.g., "Will the tiger heen?"). The input was further manipulated for…

Purpose: Information-processing limitations have been associated with language problems in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These processing limitations may be associated with limitations in attentional capacity, even in the absence of clinically significant attention deficits. In this study, the authors examined the performance…

Results of the study involving 13 language-impaired children (two to three years old) indicated that unsolicited imitations play comparable facilitative roles in the lexical acquisition of normal and language-impaired children. (Author/CL)

Two studies are reported in which homonymy in the speech of children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined. Findings revealed similar performance of SLI and normal language Ss in the degree to which they showed evidence of homonymy. (Author/CL)

Conversational replies were examined in two groups of children with comparable vocabularies and speech limited to single-word utterances: (1) children with specific language impairment, ages 2 to 3 and (2) children, age 1:5 to 1:11, who were developing language normally. Language-impaired Ss produced a greater number of variety of replies to…

Although both 14 language impaired and 14 normal young children showed greater comprehension and production of words referring to objects than to actions, this tendency was not as marked for the language impaired Ss. (CL)

The study found that 8 language-impaired 3-year-old children were less likely than 10 normally developing children to apply unusual sound changes to words with the potential for homonymy, suggesting they are limited in their ability to capitalize on the phonetic regularities of language. (Author/DB)

Examined input frequency, sentence position, and duration as contributing factors to grammatical inflections. In parents' conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of four mothers' speech when reading…

The paper presents a detailed examination of an unusual pattern reflected in the speech of a 3-year-old language-impaired child. Training was instituted to increase the number of appropriate categories in the child's phonologic system. (Author/CL)

Evaluation of the speech perception of eight children (ages four and five) with specific language impairments and documented morphological difficulties found these children to be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions (typical of English grammatical…

The paper presents a case study of a phonologically disordered child whose intelligibility seemed particularly hindered by his use of both metathesis and sound preference and whose preferred sounds was promoted by other sounds in the words. Findings indicate the importance of considering contextual effects when examining for systematicity and…