The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…

Echolalia is a pervasive phenomenon in verbal children with autism, traditionally conceived of as an automatic behavior with no communicative function. However, recently it has been shown that echoes may serve interactional goals. This article, which presents a case study of a six-year-old child with autism, examines how social interaction…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998). In this paper we aim at contributing to the study of children's processing routines, examining the operations underlying the auditory processing of relative clauses in children…

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that…

We aimed to disentangle contributions of socio-pragmatic and structural language deficits to narrative competence by comparing the narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n=25), non-autistic children with language impairments (LI; n=23), and children with typical development (TD; n=27). Groups were matched for age (6½ to 15…

It has been proposed that cochlear implant users may develop robust categorical perception skills, but that they show limited precision in perception. This article explores if a parallel contrast is observable in production, and if, despite acquiring typical linguistic representations, their early words are inconsistent. The participants were…

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD…

Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the…

Children with Down syndrome typically have weaknesses in oral language, but it has been suggested that this domain may benefit from learning to read. Amongst oral language skills, vocabulary is a relative strength, although there is some evidence of difficulties in learning the phonological form of spoken words. This study investigated the effect…

This study compared the receptive and expressive language profiles of verbally expressive children and adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) and those with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and examined the extent to which these profiles reliably differentiate the diagnostic groups. A total of twenty-four verbal participants with DS (mean age: 12 years),…

Speech perception involves the integration of auditory and visual articulatory information, and thus requires the perception of temporal synchrony between this information. There is evidence that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty with auditory speech perception but it is not known if this is also true for the…

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient…

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same "cognitive signatures" that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study…

Children typically acquire their native language naturally and spontaneously at a very young age. The emergence of early grammar can be predicted from children's vocabulary size and composition (Bates et al., 1994; Bates, Bretherton & Snyder, 1998; Bates & Goodman, 1997). One central question in language research is understanding what…