Background: Early intervention for children identified as late talkers (LTs) at the age of 24 months is still a controversial issue in research and clinical routine. Previous studies have shown inconsistent results regarding predictors of early lexical deficits on school-age outcomes of late-talking toddlers. Methods: In a five-wave follow-up…

Restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, compared to social and communicative impairments, less is known about their development, trajectory and etiology. This study explored RRBs in young children with ASD matched to typically developing (TD) children on non-verbal development.…

This investigation examined the time course and sequence of prelinguistic vocal development during the first year of cochlear implant (CI) experience. Thirteen children who were implanted between 8 and 35 months and 11 typically developing (TD) infants participated in this longitudinal study. Adult-child play interactions were video- and…

Purpose: Verbal short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) skills predict speech and language outcomes in children with cochlear implants (CIs) even after conventional demographic, device, and medical factors are taken into account. However, prior research has focused on single end point outcomes as opposed to the longitudinal process of…

Research into the acquisition of L2 German word order has provided strong evidence for a sequence of incremental stages of development. Studies of the acquisition of German verb morphology so far have focused on establishing a correlation between the acquisition of word order and of verb morphology, neglecting the question how verb morphology per…

This report examines the interrelations among several verbalization indexes on a sample of 27-month-old children and the relation of this data to vocalization scores obtained in the first year. Subjects, 67 girls and 75 boys, were firstborn Caucasian children observed at 4, 8, 13, and 27 months. Parent education varied from incomplete high school…

Discusses a longitudinal study of young children's acquisition of complex sentences for expressing their beliefs about causally related events, in the transition in language development from simple to complex syntax. While most of the children's statements expressed subjective meaning overall, the acquisition of syntactic connectives was…

Assessed the intellectual development and academic achievement of 87 diabetic children during the first 6 years of their illness. At the initial diagnosis, intellectual performance and school grades were in the average range. Over time, verbal intellectual performance and school grades declined, whereas nonverbal intellectual performance improved…

In this longitudinal investigation of the emerging grammar of seven children, differences in linguistic acquisition were observed. Analyses revealed two distinct styles of syntactic acquisition that appeared to be sex- and speed-related with specific ties to particular utterance types and grammatical-relational specification. (Author/RM)

Presents data from a longitudinal investigation concerning the development of language and communicative skills in infants suffering from focal brain injury in the pre- or perinatal period. Phonological analyses of babbling and first words are focused upon, as well as parental reports of the use of gestures for communicative purposes, word…

The persistence of individual differences in phonological development of 10 normally developing children observed at age one and again at age three was studied. The children differed considerably in rate of vocabulary acquisition and relative phonological maturity and also in their general approach to learning. (Author/JDD)

The discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. (Author/BW)

Examined the language skills of 21 6-year olds selected for linguistic precocity as toddlers, finding that verbal abilities and reading achievement remained high from age 2 through 6. Also found that phonological awareness appeared to emerge as a consequence, rather than a cause, of early reading. (31 references) (MDM)

The development of early vocalizations was investigated with 13 infants who had Down's syndrome and 27 infants developing normally, at bimonthly intervals from 4 to 18 months of age. Both groups demonstrated increased production of mature syllables over time as well as large variations in vocal development, both within and across groups and across…

Word comprehension tests were given to 24 infants at 2-month intervals. Parents of 18 of the infants kept a diary of the children's verbal production. Comprehension scores revealed a vocabulary spurt for some children. The presence of a comprehension spurt was associated with a word production spurt. (BC)