Purpose: Children with autism are found to have delayed and heterogeneous gesture abilities. It is important to understand the growth of gesture abilities and the underlying factors affecting its growth. Addressing these issues can help to design effective intervention programs. Method: Thirty-five Chinese-speaking preschoolers with autism…

This study examined whether associations exist between PA intensity, self-regulation, and indicators of school readiness, a proxy for academic achievement, in young children. Thirty young children completed assessments of physical activity, school readiness indicators, and self-regulation. Physical activity intensity was classified as light,…

This study aims to evaluate online language exchange platforms and its main focus is on the website named "www.free4talk.com" as an example. The theoretical framework is based on self-directed learning, e-tandem language learning, community of inquiry and expressive language competency. Interviews with the founder, administrator and some…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

This study aimed to evaluate the language skills of preschool children through narrative. The Turkish Test of Early Language Development (TEDIL) was used to evaluate the receptive and expressive verbal language skills of the children, and language samples were collected using the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI). The Mean Length of…

The mention of Cued Speech (CS) within the field of deaf education and deaf studies is sure to spark some strong opinions. In this systematic review of the literature, the existing evidence related to the use of CS is examined thematically. While several studies indicate differences between modalities, the purpose of this paper is not to refute…

Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a genetic, degenerative disorder, in which individuals become unable to engage in typical motor activities, including speech. The outcome for the most common type of SMA (Type 1), has previously been death before the age of 2, but new medical improvements are showing promising results for life longevity. Research has…

We explored whether supported (SJE) or coordinated joint engagement (CJE) between mothers recruited from the community and their 24-month-old children who were slow-to-talk at 18 months old were associated with child language scores at ages 24, 36, and 48 months (n = 197). We further explored whether SJE or CJE modifed the concurrent positive…

Background: Early and effective treatment for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is important. Although a growing body of research shows the effects of interventions at the group level, clinicians observe large individual differences in language growth, and differences in outcomes across language domains. A systematic…

Purpose: The present study examined the nature of the effects (direct or indirect) of vocabulary, phonological and morphological awareness on early reading skills in the consistent Greek orthography by testing a unifying model of early reading development in a sample of 141 first-grade children. Method: Vocabulary, phonological and morphological…

Background: We discuss a free software system (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) that can enable fast, thorough, and informative language sample analysis (LSA). Method: We describe methods for eliciting, transcribing, analyzing, and interpreting language samples. Using a hypothetical child speaker, we illustrate use KidEval to generate a…

It is increasingly prevalent in digital learning and teaching strategies for discerning a global perspective on creating the student learning experience. Multimodality is an emergent phenomenon that may influence how digital learning is designed, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic in which immersive learning environments, such as a virtual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to document whether mean length of utterance[subscript SUGAR] (MLU[subscript S]), total number of words (TNW), clauses per sentence (CPS), and/or words per sentence (WPS) demonstrated age-related changes in children with typically developing language, aged 7;0-10;11 (years;months). Method: Participants were…