This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Background: Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when language is significantly below chronological age expectations in the absence of other developmental disorders, sensory impairments or global developmental delays. It has been suggested that gesture may enhance communication in children with SLI by providing an alternative means to…

Matrix training is a systematic teaching approach that can facilitate generalized language. Specific responses are taught that result in the emergence of untrained responses. This type of training facilitates the use of generalized language in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study used a matrix training procedure with a toddler…

This dissertation outlines a program for the theory of phonotactics--the theory of speakers' knowledge of possible and impossible (or likely and unlikely) words--and argues that the alternative view of phonotactics as stochastic, and of phonotactic learning as probabilistic inference, is not capable of accounting for the facts of this domain.…

There is a need to provide bilingual assessments and reference data to identify those who struggle to acquire their heritage language (L1) or the language spoken in the country of residence (L2). However, bilingual assessments and data are still sparse. Therefore, the aim was to use a tablet application to screen receptive vocabulary in different…

The purpose of this study was to develop a parallel bilingual vocabulary measure for the comparative study of receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in young Armenian-English bilinguals. The measure was comprised of four independent vocabulary lists equivalent on age of acquisition ratings. The lists were counterbalanced across four tasks,…

In contrast to Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI), there are far fewer meta-analyses evaluating Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs) (Schreibman et al., 2015). Indeed, Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT)--a prominent NDBI--lacks meta-analytic studies. In the context of developing a line of research on the…

Background: Identifying risk and protective factors for language development informs interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Maternal responsive and intrusive communicative behaviours are associated with language development. Mother-child interaction quality may influence how children use these behaviours in language…

The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine spelling acquisition in French children with developmental language disorder (DLD) over a school year. Through a fine-grained spelling error analysis, we investigated whether spelling profiles could be established in the DLD population. This study comprised three groups: a typically developing (TD)…

Background: The effect of assisted reproduction technology (ART) on language development is still unclear. Moreover, different techniques are introduced at rapid pace and are not always accompanied by extensive follow-up programmes. Aims: To investigate the language development of 3-10-year-old children born following ART using intracytoplasmic…

The purpose of this study was to examine the fast mapping skills in Spanish-English bilingual preschool children in two learning contexts: storybook reading and cartoon viewing. Eighteen typically developing Spanish-English bilingual preschool children completed a fast mapping task in Spanish (L1) and in English (L2). In 4 different sessions, each…

This study is about the role of elicited verbal imitation in toddler word learning. Forty-eight toddlers were taught eight nonwords linked to referents. During training, they were asked to imitate the nonwords. Naming of the referents was tested at three intervals (one minute later [uncued], five minutes, and 1-7 days later [cued]) and recognition…

Shared reading represents an established practice to foster preschool vocabulary development, particularly when coupled with explicit instruction in word meanings. However, a question remains as to whether explicit word definitions detract from story delivery and hence language learning. Accordingly, this study compared explicit versus…

In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…