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"…

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and…

Background: Accurate and meaningful assessment of language and communication skills to monitor child progress is the cornerstone to appropriate intervention for children with complex communication needs (CCN; Brady et al., 2016; Rowland et al., 2012). Despite this need, there is a lack of high quality and validated measurement of young children…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Although a "semantic receptive-expressive gap" appears to be a universal feature of early bilingualism, little is known about its development. We sought to determine if the magnitude of the discrepancy between receptive and expressive standard scores changed over time in bilingual children's two languages. In this longitudinal study,…

As we listen to speech, our ability to understand what was said requires us to retrieve and bind together individual word meanings into a coherent discourse representation. This so-called semantic unification is a fundamental cognitive skill, and its development relies on the integration of neural activity throughout widely distributed functional…

The Four Es (Explain, Engage, Extend, Examine) is a concrete approach to incorporating research-based practice into daily vocabulary instruction by focusing on the pivotal role of teacher and student talk in word learning. Specifically, teachers use language that is understandable to students, identify misunderstandings and correct them within a…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and social pragmatic communication disorder (SPCD) are two neurodevelopmental disorders with many similarities in affected individuals' impairments in social-communicative and pragmatic development. A central question pertaining to their differentiation concerns whether the distinction is truly…

The number of learners seeking to acquire an L2 by means of apps is ever-increasing. This study examined the effectiveness of using the app "Mondly" for the acquisition of L2 English vocabulary while accounting for differences in the acquisition of receptive and productive aspects of word knowledge. Twelve Danish young learners (aged…

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing--a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…