Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…

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: Speech and language are interconnected systems, and language disorder often co-occurs with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and non-CAS speech sound disorders (SSDs). Potential trade-off effects between speech and language in connected speech in children without overt language disorder have been less explored. Method: Story retell…

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is "medial wh-question" errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., "What do you think who the cat chased?" from…

This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…

Background and aims: Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in "wh"-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object "wh"-questions…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

Purpose: Child language acquisition is marked by an optional infinitive period (ages 2-4 years) during which children use nonfinite (infinitival) verb forms and finite verb forms interchangeably in grammatical contexts that require finite forms. In English, children's errors include omissions of past tense /--ed/ and 3rd-person singular /--s/.…

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children's…

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…

Purpose: This research attempted to replicate Hoffman's 2009 finding that the proportion of narrative utterances with semantic or syntactic errors (i.e., = 14% "restricted utterances") can differentiate school-age children with typical development from those with language impairment with a sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 88%.…

This study explored pronoun production and general syntactic abilities in story retelling and story generation among children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty-four children diagnosed with ASD, ages 6;1-14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children ages 5;11-14;4 participated in the study. The linguistic measures for general syntax…

This study investigates syntax in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), its parallelism with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its relation to other aspects of cognition. We focus on (1) 3rd person accusative clitic (ACC3) production, a clinical marker of SLI hypothesized to relate to WM, and (2) 1st person accusative clitic (ACC1) production,…