The primary objective of this study was to describe cognitive and pre-academic skills of children born preterm (< 30 weeks gestational age) at preschool age. A secondary objective was to relate cognitive functioning at preschool age to developmental scores obtained using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-Third Edition (Bayley…

Background & Aims: Given that standardized language measures alone are inadequate for identifying functionally defined developmental language disorder (fDLD), this study investigated whether non-linguistic cognitive abilities (procedural learning, motor functions, executive attention, processing speed) can increase the prediction accuracy of…

Most research reporting that bilingual children exhibit enhanced cognitive skills and social awareness relative to their monolingual peers focusses on children raised and educated bilingually, making it difficult to pinpoint the degree of second language exposure necessary for such advantages to materialise. The current study measures the social…

Purpose: Previous research into the working, declarative, and procedural memory systems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has yielded inconsistent results. The purpose of this research was to profile these memory systems in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Method: One hundred four 5- to 8-year-old…

This study investigated whether the role of working memory capacity varies over the course of second language (L2) morphosyntactic development. Eighty-seven beginning, intermediate, and advanced university L2 Spanish learners completed two nonverbal tasks measuring executive function (EF) and phonological working memory (PWM) in their native…

Thirty-four children, with autism spectrum disorders, ages 4-14 years, were matched and randomly assigned to one of two conditions for learning a novel juice-making task and producing two novel words about the event. Seventeen sighted children were manually guided to perform the task and tactually prompted during imitated productions of novel…

The current study was designed to examine the relationships between performance on a nonverbal phoneme deletion task administered in a dynamic assessment format with performance on measures of phoneme deletion, word-level reading, and speech sound production that required verbal responses for school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs).…

A meta-analysis was undertaken to reexamine near- and far-transfer effects following working-memory training and to consider potential moderators more systematically. Forty-seven studies with 65 group comparisons were included in the meta-analysis. Results showed near-transfer effects to short-term and working-memory skills that were sustained at…

This research investigated the developing inter-relationships between language, graphic symbolism and symbolic play both concurrently and longitudinally from the fourth to the fifth year of childhood. Sixty children ("n"?=?60) aged between 3 and 4?years completed multiple assessments of language and assessments of graphic symbolism,…

This study investigated the longitudinal relation between children's theory of mind and their metacognitive knowledge with a special focus on the impact of language on this relation. Measures of theory-of-mind understanding and metamemory knowledge were assessed in 133 3-year-old children at 4 measurement points separated by half-year intervals.…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

Background: The development of children's speech, language, and literacy skills is considered to build on a robust and intact speech-processing system, with normally functioning skills at all levels of input and output processing, as well as storage. There are a range of tasks available that assess input and output processing skills, however there…

Considerable research effort has been dedicated to exploring how well children with autistic spectrum disorders infer eye gaze direction from the face of an actor. Here we combine task performance (accuracy to correctly label a target item) and eye movement information ("where" the participant fixates when completing the task) to understand more…

This research investigated whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) and non-specific language impairment (NLI) could be differentiated by their oral narrative characteristics. Oral narrative samples were collected from 69 children and comparisons were made among four groups of participants. The two language impairment groups (SLI…

This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of a group of deaf adolescents and how these skills correlated with decoding skills (single word and non-word reading) and receptive vocabulary. Twenty, congenitally profoundly deaf adolescents with at least average nonverbal cognitive skills were tested on a range of phonological awareness…