Purpose: Researchers have previously shown that individual differences in measures of receptive language ability at age 12 are highly heritable. In the current study, the authors attempted to identify some of the genes responsible for the heritability of receptive language ability using a "genome-wide association" approach. Method: The…

Purpose: To examine the cross-cultural applicability of the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) through a comparison of respondents with Parkinson's disease (PD) from the United States and New Zealand. Method: A total of 428 respondents--218 from the United States and 210 from New Zealand-completed the self-report CPIB and a series…

Purpose: Evidence from children's spontaneous speech suggests that utterance length and utterance position may help explain why children omit grammatical morphemes in some contexts but not others. This study investigated whether increased utterance length (hence, increased grammatical complexity) adversely affects children's third person…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of sign characteristics in a key word signing (KWS) system on the functional use of those signs by adults with intellectual disability (ID). Method: All 507 signs from a Flemish KWS system were characterized in terms of phonological, iconic, and referential characteristics.…

Purpose: The authors of this article examined the etiology of developmental language impairment (LI) at 4 and 12 years of age, as well as the relationship between the 2. Method: Phenotypic and quantitative genetic analyses using longitudinal data from the Twins Early Development Study (Oliver & Plomin, 2007) were conducted. A total of 2,923…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject-verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method: An SLI…

Purpose: Chronic deep brain stimulation of the nucleus ventralis intermedius is an effective treatment for individuals with medication-resistant essential tremor. However, these individuals report that stimulation has a deleterious effect on their speech. The present study investigates one important factor leading to these effects: the…

Purpose: The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages.…

Purpose: To investigate the attitudes of school teachers toward children with voice problems in a Chinese population. Method: Three groups of listeners participated in this study: primary school teachers, speech-language pathology students, and general university students. The participants were required to make attitude judgments on 12 voice…

Purpose: The authors investigated the importance of phonemic length discrimination ability on reading and spelling skills among children with reading disabilities and familial risk for dyslexia and among children with typical reading skills, as well as the role of prereading skills in reading and spelling development in children with reading…

Purpose: Sign language users recruit physical properties of visual motion to convey linguistic information. Research on American Sign Language (ASL) indicates that signers systematically use kinematic features (e.g., velocity, deceleration) of dominant hand motion for distinguishing specific semantic properties of verb classes in production…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine whether biases for infant-directed (ID) speech and faces differ between infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (SIBS-A) and infant siblings of typically developing children (SIBS-TD), and whether speech and face biases predict language outcomes and risk group membership.…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored the impact of test language and cultural status on vocabulary and working memory performance in multilingual language-minority children. Method: Twenty 7-year-old Portuguese-speaking immigrant children living in Luxembourg completed several assessments of first (L1)- and second-language (L2) vocabulary…

Purpose: To address the problem of low reading comprehension scores among children with hearing impairment, it is necessary to have a better understanding of their reading vocabulary. In this study, the authors investigated whether task and word type differentiate the reading vocabulary knowledge of children with and without severe hearing loss.…

Purpose: In this article, the authors sought to determine whether the precise age of implantation (AOI) remains an important predictor of spoken language outcomes in later childhood for those who received a cochlear implant (CI) between 12 and 38 months of age. Relative advantages of receiving a bilateral CI after age 4.5 years, better…