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…

Purpose: In this reply, we respond to comments on our article "Tracking the Growth of Tense and Agreement in Children With Specific Language Impairment: Differences Between Measures of Accuracy, Diversity, and Productivity." Conclusion: The finite verb morphology composite can be disproportionately affected by frequently occurring…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection.…

Purpose: This study was specifically designed to examine how verb variability and verb overlap in a morphosyntactic priming task affect typically developing children's use and generalization of auxiliary IS. Method: Forty typically developing 2- to 3-year-old native English-speaking children with inconsistent auxiliary IS production were primed…

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: Composite measures of children's use of tense and agreement morphology differ in their emphasis on accuracy, diversity, or productivity, yet little is known about how these different measures change over time. An understanding of these differences is especially important for the study of children with specific language impairment, given…

Purpose: Our purpose was to test the competing sources of input (CSI) hypothesis by evaluating an intervention based on its principles. This hypothesis proposes that children's use of main verbs without tense is the result of their treating certain sentence types in the input (e.g., "Was 'she laughing'?") as models for declaratives…