Purpose: This research explored the impact of neighborhood density (ND), word frequency (WF), and word length (WL) on the vocabulary size of Danish-speaking children. Given the particular phonological properties of Danish, the impact was expected to differ from that reported in studies on English and French. Method: The monosyllabic words in the…

Background: This study examined the narrative skills of Cantonese-speaking school-age children to fill a need for a normative language test for school-age children. Purpose: To provide a benchmark of the narrative skills of Cantonese-speaking children; to identify which of the microstructure components was the best predictor of age; and to…

Purpose: To document the lexical characteristics of neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) in the lexicons of a large sample of English-speaking toddlers. Method: Parents of 222 British-English-speaking children aged 27([plus or minus]3) months completed a British adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory:…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the diagnostic accuracy of a composite clinical assessment measure based on mean length of utterance (MLU), lexical diversity (D), and age (Klee, Stokes, Wong, Fletcher, & Gavin, 2004) in a second, independent sample of 4-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without specific language impairment…

Purpose: To assess the diagnostic accuracy of a new Test of Early Nonword Repetition (TENR) for 2-year-old children. Method: 232 British-English-speaking children aged 27 ([plus or minus] 3) months were assessed on 3 standardized tests (receptive and expressive vocabulary and visual processing) and a novel nonword repetition (NWR) test. Parents…

Purpose: Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Method: Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR…

The notion of a universal pattern of phonological development, rooted in basic physiological constraints, is controversial, with some researchers arguing for a strong environmental (ambient language) influence on phonological development or an interaction of both physiological constraints and ambient language effects. This research examines the…

Previous studies of verb morphology in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been limited in the main to tense and agreement morphemes. Cantonese, which, like other Chinese languages, has no grammatical tense, presents an opportunity to investigate potential difficulties for children with SLI in other areas of verb morphology, via…

Contrastive feature hierarchies have been developed and used for some time in depicting typical phonological development and in guiding therapy decisions. Previous descriptions of feature use have been based on independent analyses and usually phonetic inventories. However, recent trends in phonology include a relational analysis of phonemic…

Little is known about language development in school-age children in Asian countries. This research reports on 3 measures of language development in 100 Cantonese-speaking children age 5 to 9 years. Word scores, structure scores, and the mean length of communication units (MLCU) were derived from a story-retelling task. The structure score was…

Two studies of children's conversational language abilities are reported. In the first, mean length of utterance (MLU) and lexical diversity (D) were examined in a group of typically developing Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Regression analyses indicated a significant linear relationship between MLU and age (R = .44) and a significant…

English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) appear to have special difficulty in the use of who-object questions (e.g., Who is the girl chasing?). It has been argued that problems related to grammatical movement may be responsible for this difficulty. However, it is also possible that the lower frequency of who-object…

This study examined the interaction of ambient frequency and feature complexity in the diphthong errors produced by 13 Cantonese-speaking children with phonological disorders. Perceptual analysis of 611 diphthongs identified those most frequently and least frequently in error. Suggested treatment guidelines include consideration of three factors:…