Background: The goal of this study was to examine the effect of cognates on Spanish-English bilingual children's English reading fluency. Because cognates lead to higher levels of non-target language activation, we hypothesised that the presence of cognates would result in reduced reading fluency for bilingual children. Methods: Monolingual…

Background: Two ubiquitous findings from the literature are that (1) children with specific language impairments (SLI) repeat nonwords less accurately than peers with typical language development (TLD), and (2) all children repeat nonwords with frequent phonotactic patterns more accurately than low-probability nonwords. Many studies have examined…

Purpose: There is conflicting evidence regarding if and how a deficit in executive function may be associated with developmental language impairment (LI). Nonlinguistic stimuli are now frequently used when testing executive function to avoid a language confound. However, it is possible that increased stimulus processing demands for nonlinguistic…

Purpose: This review evaluated whether 9 single-word tests of phonological error patterns provide adequate content coverage to accurately identify error patterns that are active in a child's speech. Method: Tests in the current study were considered to display sufficient opportunities to assess common phonological error patterns if they…

Several proposals in the literature on conceptual development converge on the claim that information about "kinds of things" in the world has a privileged status in children's cognition, insofar as it is acquired, manipulated, and stored with surprising ease. Our goal in the present studies (N = 440) was to test a prediction of this…

We used an adapted alternating treatments design to compare skill acquisition during discrete-trial instruction using immediate reinforcement, delayed reinforcement with immediate praise, and delayed reinforcement for 2 children with autism spectrum disorder. Participants acquired the skills taught with immediate reinforcement; however, delayed…

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%.…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of different speech-generating device displays and vocabulary organizations on the acquisition of multi-step requesting responses in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Four young children with ASD were taught to use an iPad® application to make requests using both a taxonomically…

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared…

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…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

Background: Problems with pragmatic aspects of language are well attested in individuals on the autism spectrum. It remains unclear, however, whether figurative language skills improve with language status and whether problems in figurative language are no longer present in highly verbal individuals with autism. Aims: To investigate whether highly…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) engage in highly perseverative and inflexible behaviours. Technological tools, such as robots, received increased attention as social reinforces and/or assisting tools for improving the performance of children with ASD. The aim of our study is to investigate the role of the robotic toy Keepon in a…