Background: Evidence on the treatment effectiveness for bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI) is needed to advance both theory and clinical practice. Of key interest is whether treatment effects are maintained following the completion of short-term intense treatments. Aims: To investigate change in select language and cognitive…

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children's sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of specific language impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: (1) To evaluate the effects of…

Background: Research regarding expressive language performance in children born with cleft palate is sparse. The relationship between articulation/phonology and expressive language skills also needs to be further explored. Aims: To investigate verbal competence in narrative retelling in 5-year-old children born with unilateral cleft lip and palate…

Background: The purpose of this study is to investigate the pragmatic abilities of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Several studies in the literature have previously reported communicative deficits in individuals with TBI, however such research has focused principally on communicative deficits in general, without providing an…

Background: Although it is well-established that children with language impairment (LI) and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) both show elevated levels of emotional and behavioural problems, the level and types of difficulties across the two groups have not previously been directly compared. Aims: To compare levels of emotional and…

Background: A number of studies have suggested that language in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may not be simply delayed compared with language in typically developing (TD) children, but deviant. The deviance has been detected in the comprehension of pronouns, and it has triggered proposals for the existence of a specific syntactic deficit in…

Background: Depending on the severity of their disabilities, children with Down syndrome (DS) and with cerebral palsy (CP) may remain pre-symbolic for prolonged periods of time. When interacting with pre-symbolic children, communication partners have a role in identifying which of their behaviours are communicative, to be able to respond to those…

Background: The few studies that have evaluated syntax in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have yielded conflicting findings: some suggest that once matched on mental age, ASD and typically developing controls do not differ for grammar, while others report that morphosyntactic deficits are independent of cognitive skills in ASD. There is a need for…

Background: Morphosyntax has been well researched in specific language impairment (SLI) and there is general agreement that children with SLI have particular difficulties with tense-marking. Less well researched is the role that aspect plays in the difficulties found in tense-marking, especially as tense and aspect are often confounded in English.…

Background: In general, children with specific language impairment (SLI) tend to fall behind their typically developing (TD) peers in educational attainment. Less is known about how children with SLI fare in particular areas of the curriculum and what predicts their levels of performance. Aims: To compare the distributions of performance of…

Background: The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a popular augmentative communication system frequently used with "nonverbal" children with autism. Several studies suggested that PECS could represent an effective tool for promoting improvement of several social-communicative skills. Only sparse evidence is instead…

Background: To date there is limited information documenting growth patterns in the narratives of bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). Aims: This study was designed to determine whether bilingual children with and without PLI present similar gains from kindergarten to first grade in the macro- and microstructure…

Background: In recent years, there has been increased identification of disfluencies in individuals with autism, but limited examination of disfluencies in the school-age range of this population. We currently lack information about whether the disfluencies of children with autism represent concomitant stuttering, normal disfluency, excessive…

Background: Metronome-paced speech results in the elimination, or substantial reduction, of stuttering moments. The cause of fluency during this fluency-inducing condition is unknown. Several investigations have reported changes in speech pattern characteristics from a control condition to a metronome-paced speech condition, but failure to control…

Background: Overt stuttering is inhibited by approximately 80% when people who stutter read aloud as they hear an altered form of their speech feedback to them. However, levels of stuttering inhibition vary from 60% to 100% depending on speaking situation and signal presentation. For example, binaural presentations of delayed auditory feedback…