Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether scoring of the gestures point, give, and show were correlated across measurement tools used to assess gesture production in children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: Seventy-eight children with ASD between the ages of 23 and 37 months participated. Correlational analyses…

Purpose: Vocabulary is a domain of particular challenge for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent research has drawn attention to ways in which lexical characteristics relate to vocabulary acquisition. The current study tested the hypothesis that lexical characteristics account for variability in vocabulary size of young…

Purpose: This study presents an analysis of language skills in individuals with Noonan syndrome (NS), an autosomal dominant genetic disorder. We investigated whether the language impairments affecting some individuals arise from deficits specifically within the linguistic system or whether they are associated with cognitive, perceptual, and motor…

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself. Method: Fourteen-year-old…

Purpose: This study examined the longitudinal relationships between lexical and grammatical development in typically developing (TD) and late-talking children for the purposes of testing the single-mechanism account of language acquisition and comparing the developmental trajectories of lexical and grammatical development in late-talking and TD…

Purpose: To examine concurrently and retrospectively the language abilities of children with specific reading comprehension deficits ("poor comprehenders") and compare them to typical readers and children with specific decoding deficits ("poor decoders"). Method: In Study 1, the authors identified 57 poor comprehenders, 27 poor decoders, and 98…

This study used neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to examine the claim that processing capacity limitations underlie specific language impairment (SLI). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate verbal working memory in adolescents with SLI and normal language (NL) controls. The experimental task involved a modified…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are distinct developmental disorders. Method: Study 1 investigated the overlap between SLI identified in kindergarten and dyslexia identified in 2nd, 4th, or 8th grades in a representative sample of 527 children. Study 2 examined…

The present study compared the performance of 44 Latino children on the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT; C. Gaulin & T. Campbell, 1994) and the Dual Processing Comprehension Task (DPCT; S. Ellis Weismer, 1996). First, it was of interest to know if there were significant differences between children with and without bilingual proficiency…

This study examined nonword repetition performance in 581 second graders participating in a longitudinal investigation of specific language impairment. Results indicated that children with language impairments, as well as those in intervention, exhibited deficient nonword repetition skills and that the Nonword Repetition Task is a culturally…

A study involving 21 toddlers who were late talkers investigated the effects of early language intervention on various linguistic and social skills. Results indicated those who received early intervention demonstrated increased complexity, increased verbal output, higher lexical diversity, and improved intelligibility of spontaneous speech and…

Comparison of English past-tense productivity in 31 school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 31 children with no language (NL) impairment found SLI children made more errors, with a greater proportion resulting from overuse of unmarked grammatical forms (e.g., "go") than from suffixation (e.g., "goed"). Children with SLI…

A study examined the influence of emphatic stress on word learning of 20 children (ages 6 to 9) with specific language impairments and 20 typical children. There were no significant stress effects for comprehension or recognition of novel words; however, children in both groups exhibited better word production when presented with emphatic stress.…

Two studies found positive effects of peer modeling upon the play scripts of preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI). The first study involved dyadic play sessions in which children with SLI were paired with a normal language peer model. The second study compared dyads of either two SLI children or one SLI child and one normal…