Research examining relations between language skills and social competence has yielded mixed findings. Three meta-analyses investigated links between language skills (overall, receptive, and expressive) and social competence in 2- to 12-year-old children. Data from 130 studies representing 62,120 children (M age at language assessment = 4.70…

Background: The evidence on the effect of age on the receptive and expressive language skills of individuals with Down syndrome is inconclusive. Recent research highlights the relevance of having tools to detect age-related changes in language skills. Method: Data were collected on 45 adults with Down syndrome. All were assessed with the Peabody…

Background: Early intervention is recommended for pre-school children with low language. However, few robustly evaluated language interventions for young children exist. Furthermore, in many interventions the theoretical underpinnings are underspecified and the 'active ingredients' of the interventions not tested. This paper presents a…

Spoken narrative skills are crucial to the social and academic success of young people; however, research indicates that this may be an area of challenge for autistic adolescents. Most previous studies have used narrative elicitation tasks that incorporate visual support, and little is known about how autistic adolescents perform on less…

The current study reports the results of a randomized controlled trial examining the impact of the Getting Ready parent-engagement intervention on expressive language skills of children (N = 267) with developmental concerns upon entry into preschool. Latent growth for expressive language and moderating roles of parental stress and parental…

The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

Researchers have focused on how deaf signing children acquire and use American Sign Language (ASL). One sub-skill of ASL proficiency is ASL phonology. This includes the ability to isolate and manipulate parameters within signs (i.e., handshape, location, and movement). Expressively, signed language phonological fluency tasks have investigated…

This study explored the connection between children's language skills, creativity, and play. The participants were 151 (76 boys and 75 girls) primarily middle-income, European American children. Ages ranged from 4 to 6 years. This project employed mixed methods approaches. Children engaged in several tasks. These included: creating a story about…

A growing body of research suggests that fine motor skills (FMS) are associated with language development. In this study, we examined 76 children aged 3-6 years assessing the link between language and FMS. Specific measures included receptive and expressive vocabulary, oral narrative skills, and various fine motor tasks. Hierarchical linear…

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Numerous studies have evidenced the relationship between musical rhythm and language performances, derived from temporal acoustic signal processing. This relationship might be affected by different language experiences. Receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and musical rhythm perception and production were examined…

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: Children's vocabulary and syntactic skills vary upon school entry in depth and breadth, persistently influencing academic performance, including reading. Enhancing early communicative abilities through multisensory, playful, and conversational experiences is essential and will benefit children's school readiness. This study investigated…

Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

Preschoolers born preterm are at an increased risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes; however, the impact of preterm birth on speech development has not been fully investigated. The primary objective of this study was to document the conversational speech production abilities of preschoolers born preterm via speech sample analysis. A…