Background: Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a slowly progressive multi-systemic disease with an autosomal-dominant inheritance caused by a mutation on chromosome 19 (19q13.3). Aims: To explore speech characteristics in a group of individuals with the congenital and childhood-onset forms of DM1 in terms of intelligibility, speech-sound…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) frequently have difficulties with word learning and understanding vocabulary. For these children, this can significantly impact on social interactions, daily activities and academic progress. Although there is literature providing a rationale for targeting word learning in such…

Background: Children's vocabulary knowledge is closely related to other measures of language development and to literacy skills and educational attainment. Aim: To use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to evaluate the effectiveness of a small-group vocabulary intervention programme for children with poor vocabulary knowledge. Methods &…

Background: A limited number of studies have analyzed grammaticality in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Most of the available data are based on bilingual speakers. Aims: To extend previous studies by doing a more detailed analysis of grammatical types in monolingual Spanish-speakers with and without…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

Background: To date very few studies have investigated the musical skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI). There is growing evidence that SLI affects areas other than language, and it is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that children with this disorder may have difficulties in perceiving musical stimuli appropriately. Aims:…

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: Children with language impairment (LI) often have lags in development of print knowledge, an important early-literacy skill. This study explores impacts of a print-focused intervention for Spanish-speaking children with LI in Southeastern Mexico. Aims: Aims were twofold. First, we sought to describe the print knowledge (print-concept…

Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…

Background & Aims: The present study examined how phonological and lexical knowledge influences memory in children with specific language impairments (SLI). Previous work showed recall advantages for typical adults and children due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency and a recall disadvantage due to phonological similarity…

Background: Young children are often required to carry out writing tasks in an educational context. However, little is known about the patterns of writing skills that children with specific language impairment (CwSLI) have relative to their typically developing peers. Aims: To assess the written language skills of CwSLI and compare these with…

Background: Children who do not produce single words by the expected age have been described as "late talkers" or as demonstrating "late language emergence" (LLE). Although their short-term growth in vocabulary is often strong, longer-term consequences of LLE remain in dispute. It has been argued that the majority of school-age…

Background: Non-word repetition (NWR) difficulties are common, but not universal, among children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, older children and adolescents with SLI have rarely been studied. Studies disagree on the relationship between NWR difficulties and difficulties with other areas of language and literacy. There is also…

Background: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Aims: Hungarian is an agglutinating…

Background: Children with language impairments have difficulty in reporting verbal inferences, but it is unclear whether the source of this problem lies in limitations of language comprehension, an inability to access world knowledge, or the integration of information in discourse. Children with pragmatic language impairments (CwPLI) are often…