Purpose: The present study explored the extent to which early prelinguistic communication skills predict expressive language in toddlers with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism), who are known to be at high likelihood for autism and language disorder, and a comparison group of toddlers with non-autistic older siblings (Sibs-NA). Method: Participants…

This study investigated receptive and expressive language outcomes in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with and without a history of language/communication regression, employing three progressively less stringent definitions of regression. Data were derived from a large, longitudinal sample of children with ASD in which regression was…

The present study examines the effectiveness of play therapy (based on the cognitive-behavioural approach) and puppet play therapy in expressive\ receptive language disorders of the studied population. Here, we imported 45 female bilingual preschool children to our research. Their expressive\ receptive language disorders have been approved…

Purpose: The goal of this work was to examine the semantic and syntactic properties of the vocabularies of autistic and non-autistic infants and toddlers to see if children in these two groups know different kinds of words. We focused on both receptive and expressive vocabularies. For expressive vocabulary, we looked only at the "active"…

Purpose: This study evaluates the extent to which automated indices of vocal development are stable and valid for predicting language in infants at increased familial likelihood for autism and/or language impairment and relatively lower likelihood infants. Method: A group of infants with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism; 20 infants) and a comparison…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and fragile X syndrome (FXS) are neurodevelopmental disorders with overlapping pragmatic language impairments. Prior work suggests pragmatic language differences may run in families. This study examined specific pragmatic difficulties (i.e., linguistic mazes and perseverations) in boys (9-18 years) with idiopathic…

Purpose: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs'…

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of Sketch and Speak strategy intervention on expressive and receptive expository discourse for adolescents with language-related learning disabilities (LLD). Method: Three participants completed baseline and twelve 45- to 60-min individual treatment sessions in a multiple-baseline across participants…

Purpose: This study compares the home language environments of children with (a suspicion of) developmental language disorder (DLD) with that of children with typical development (TD). It does so by adopting new technology that automatically provides metrics about children's language environment (Language ENvironment Analysis [LENA]). In addition,…

Children with partially intelligible speech and language difficulties are often provided with speech-generating devices (SGDs) to support their spoken communication. However, little is known about how SGDs can be used best to facilitate language development. This study evaluated the effects of a conversation-based intervention using SGDs, on the…

Purpose: This study explores whether the quality of parent-child interaction is associated with language abilities cross-sectionally and longitudinally up to preschool-age among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Participants were 97 monolingual children with DLD and their parents from the Helsinki Longitudinal SLI study,…

Background: In 2016/17, the CATALISE Consortium published the results of a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study, representing agreement among professionals about the definition and process of identification of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (Bishop et al., 2016, 2017). The extent to which the current…

Background: Individuals with developmental language disorder or Williams syndrome are reported to use more gestures than individuals with typical development. However, these two groups differ considerably in visuospatial and language skills, two skills that are hypothesized to shape gesture rate. Aims: We first examined whether children with both…

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a common reading disability, affecting 5% to 11% of children in North America. Children classified as having DD often have a history of early language delay (ELD) or language impairments. Nevertheless, studies have reported conflicting results as to the association between DD-ELD and the extent of current language…

Background: The Language Development Survey (LDS) and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) are two parental report forms that have been productive in providing data on early child language during the past 30 years. The instruments have been used both in studies relating to typical developing children and in screening…