Purpose: Children with a developmental language disorder (DLD) are often delayed in their grammatical development. This is suggested to be the most important characteristic and clinical marker of DLD. However, it is unknown if this assumption is valid for young children, in the earliest stages of grammatical development. For this reason, this…

This study investigates the grammatical skills of typically developing Oromo-speaking preschool-age children and lays the foundation for a language assessment tool for Oromo, a Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. The current study used a standard picture-based elicitation task that evaluated children's accuracy in producing grammatical…

Purpose: Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e., precocious) relative to peers of their age. In this study, we explored the…

Strong correlations between vocabulary and grammar are well attested in language development in monolingual and bilingual children. What is less clear is whether there is any directionality in the relationship between the two constructs, whether it is predictive over time, and the extent to which it is affected by language input. In the present…

Growing up in the digital era, young children are exposed to numerous educational applications and programs, some with well-designed curricula and others focused more on entertainment or game-like qualities. With the increasing popularity of mobile language-learning applications among young children, this dissertation raises a crucial question: do…

Purpose: This work explores the clinical relevance of three measures of morpheme use for preschool-age Spanish-English bilingual children with varying language skills. The 3 measures reflect accuracy, diversity (the tense marker total), and productivity (the tense and agreement productivity score [TAP score]) of the English tense and agreement…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of standardized assessments of expressive grammar and vocabulary in a sample of preschool-age dual language learners (DLLs) who use Jamaican Creole (JC) and English. Adult models from the same linguistic community as these children were used to inform culturally and…

This study explores typically developing bilingual children's performance in their English as a heritage language. The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of heritage language expectations and the role of chronological age and bilingual exposure. A broad range of receptive and expressive linguistic domains are investigated as a…

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24-32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop…

We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation…

Purpose: This review article summarizes a program of longitudinal investigation of twins' language acquisition with a focus on causal pathways for specific language impairment (SLI) and nonspecific language impairment in children at 4 and 6 years with known history at 2 years. Method: The context of the overview is established by legacy scientific…

Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…

Purpose: This study examined the use of African American English (AAE) among a group of young Latinx bilingual children and the accuracy of the English Morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in classifying these children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Children (N = 81) between the…

Purpose: Language sampling analysis (LSA) plays an important role in evaluating language skills; hence, the study aimed to develop new assessment measures for the LSA in Turkish as alternatives to mean length of utterance (MLU) and the Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure. With this aim, Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and…

Korean employs case ellipsis (CE), in which nouns are permitted to appear without case markers in certain contexts, particularly in informal settings. Heritage speakers (HS) are typically exposed to informal registers and thus exposed to fewer uses of overt case markers in the input. Given the limited exposure, it is predicted that young HS of…