Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

Children with hearing loss often attend inclusive preschool classrooms aimed at improving their spoken language skills. Although preschool classrooms are fertile environments for vocal interaction with peers, little is known about the dyadic processes that influence children's speech to one another and foster their language abilities and how these…

In this study, the researchers explored the impact of reading aloud on language acquisition for 12 infants and toddlers (6-22 months old) attending a preschool located in South Florida. The research team included university professors, a preschool director and two preschool teachers. A teacher assistant read a selected picture book to each child…

In language learning, aided language modeling refers to the method by which communication partners provide models of the communication system used by individuals with complex communication repertoires that involving both symbols and speech. Providing aided language models creates opportunities for individuals with complex communication repertoires…

Purpose: This study synthesized effects of interventions on language outcomes of young children (ages 0-8 years) with autism and evaluated the extent to which summary effects varied by intervention, participant, and outcome characteristics. Method: A subset of effect sizes gathered for a larger meta-analysis (the Autism Intervention Meta-analysis…

Purpose: Miniature linguistic systems (also known as matrix training) is a method of organizing learning targets to achieve generative learning or recombinative generalization. This systematic review is aimed at determining whether matrix training is effective for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in terms of improving recombinative…

This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with…

How the construct of vocabulary is defined remains unclear although multiple theories have been put forth. In light of the lack of empirical work investigating the dimensionality of vocabulary knowledge in Chinese, the present study investigated the factor structure of Chinese print vocabulary in a sample of 111 Taiwanese children in Grades 1 and…

The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…

Studies of language development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been primarily focused on the influence of child-based factors such as autism traits, IQ, and initial language skills. Yet the findings of these studies are inconclusive. There has, moreover, been little research compared the relative influences of child-based…

Children tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically…

Purpose: Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes.…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) present language deficits in all linguistic domains and their language development lags behind that of typically developing children. However, their receptive language skills appear to be better than their productive in all linguistic domains. Research on bilingual children with DS is limited, but has shown that…

Maternal depression and anxiety are potential risk factors to children's language environments and development. Though existing work has examined relations between these constructs, further work is needed accounting for both depression and anxiety and using more direct measures of the home language environment and children's language development.…

Purpose: This study examined vocabulary profiles in young cochlear implant (CI) recipients and in children with normal hearing (NH) matched on receptive vocabulary size to improve our understanding of young CI recipients' acquisition of word categories (e.g., common nouns or closed-class words). Method: We compared receptive and expressive…