Objective: The study aimed to investigate whether the fine motor skills measured by the Functional Dexterity Test (FDT) in ADHD children differ from healthy controls. The second aim was to assess the applicability of the FDT assessment method among ADHD children. Method: The FDT results as an objective assessment of hand skills were compared…

Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using…

Background: Despite the ability of cochlear implants (CIs) to provide children with access to speech, there is considerable variability in spoken language outcomes. Research aimed at identifying factors influencing speech production accuracy is needed. Aims: To characterize the consonant production accuracy of children with cochlear implants…

Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

Purpose: Speech sound disorder (SSD) in conjunction with a language disorder has been associated with poor literacy acquisition; however, no study has evaluated whether articulation, phonological, or sequencing skills are differentially related to reading skills. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between speech error types at ages…

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to assess the frequency and types of phonological process errors in patients with velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD) and the different types of palatal anomalies. Method: A total of 808 nonsyndromic patients with VPD, who underwent follow-up at the Center for Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies, from 2000…

Previous studies measuring praxis abilities in young autistic children have only used praxis measures that were not optimised for autistic individuals. Hence, we used the FAB-R to measure praxis skills in autistic (n = 38) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 38) aged between four and 10 years. Praxis abilities were generally not different…

Purpose: We sought to provide valid and reliable data on the acquisition of consonant sounds in speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Method: The sample comprised 733 typically developing monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (ages 3;0-8;11 [years;months]). The presence of surface speech error patterns, the revised percentage consonants…

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of word complexity which refers to the age at which a word is typically learned. AoA measures have shown strong correlations with reading comprehension, lexical decision times, and writing quality. AoA scores based on both adult and child data have limitations that allow for error in measurement, and increase…

Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to explore the potential of performance on a Danish sentence repetition (SR) task--including specific morphological and syntactic properties--to identify difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to typically developing (TD) children. Furthermore, the potential of the task as a…

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /t/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on…

The kinds of errors that children and adolescents make on phonological processing tasks were studied with a large sample between ages 4 and 19 (N = 3,842) who were tested on the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Principal component analysis identified two phonological processing factors: Basic Phonological Awareness…