We examined the extent to which the timing of inferential questioning influenced kindergartners' inferencing performance in a non-reading context, while also taking into account individual differences in language comprehension and executive function. Students completed the eight-week Early Language Comprehension Individualized Instruction (ELCII)…

We examined the extent to which the timing of inferential questioning influenced kindergartners' inferencing performance in a non-reading context, while also taking into account individual differences in language comprehension and executive function. Students completed the eight-week Early Language Comprehension Individualized Instruction (ELCII)…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD), an unexplained problem using and understanding spoken language, has been hypothesized to have an underlying auditory processing component. Auditory feedback plays a key role in speech motor control. The current study examined whether auditory feedback is used to regulate speech production in a…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

Purpose: Attention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In children who are bilingual, attentional control may be enhanced by repeated experience regulating 2 languages. In children with DLD, subtle weaknesses in sustained attention may relate to impaired…

Purpose: This study aimed to identify predictors of response to treatment for residual speech sound disorder (RSSD) affecting English rhotics. Progress was tracked during an initial phase of traditional motor-based treatment and a longer phase of treatment incorporating ultrasound biofeedback. Based on previous literature, we focused on baseline…

In contrast to the large body of research investigating intervention for poor decoding skills, far fewer studies have evaluated interventions for reading comprehension. There is even less research on children with more specific difficulties with reading comprehension, often referred to as "poor comprehenders". Levels of effectiveness…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

Background and aims: The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in…

Purpose: The study investigated the prevalence of risk factors for auditory processing and language disorders among adolescents residing at a local juvenile detention center. Method: A total of 782 adjudicated adolescents with normal hearing were screened with the Randomized Dichotic Digits Test (Strouse & Wilson, 1999) and the Dichotic Words…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…

Purpose: The goal was to determine whether interactive book reading outcomes for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were affected by manipulation of dose (i.e., the number of exposures to the target word during a book reading session) and dose frequency (i.e., the number of repeated book reading sessions) and whether pretreatment…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…