Background & aims: Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…

The ability to disengage attention and reengage elsewhere has been proposed as a fundamental deficit in the autism spectrum, potentially disrupting development of higher cognitive domains. Eye-movements were recorded while 16 autism spectrum children of mixed ability, and 18 typically developing age-matched controls, completed the Gap-Overlap…

Describing events may be challenging for any child, but children who use communication aids may face unique linguistic, pragmatic, and strategic challenges in conveying information with the communication means they have available. This study explores strategies used by young, aided communicators when describing the content of a video unknown to…

Background: Detecting reading comprehension difficulties is challenging because many factors are involved in comprehension ability. Various reading comprehension tests can be used to detect difficulties but often do not yield the same results. Method: Our aim was to analyse the agreement between three commonly used standardised reading…

It is commonly found that deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students experience delayed mathematical achievement. The present study used two nonsymbolic comparison tasks to explore the basic numerical skills of DHH students. Nine prelocutive DHH students with cochlear implants and nine hearing students, matched on nonverbal IQ, visual short-term…

Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

The Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales (RIAS) measures general intelligence and its two main components, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, each comprising of two subtests. The RIAS has been recently standardized in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. Using the standardization samples of the U.S. (n = 2,438), Danish (n = 983), German (n…

Background: Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous…