Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulty with literacy, and although it is established that phonological processing underlies literacy skills in children with typical hearing (TH), the relation of phonological processing and literacy in children with CIs is not fully understood. This study evaluated the contributions of…

Language skills have long been posited to be a factor contributing to developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to evaluate whether novel word recognition, a critical skill for language development, differentiated children who stutter from children who do not stutter. Twenty children who stutter and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 3-8…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

Purpose: Little is known about the specific nature of language abilities of autistic adolescents and young adults with language impairment (LI), limiting our knowledge of developmental trajectories and ability to develop efficacious speech/language supports. An important first step is establishing proof of concept of identification of LI in this…

Purpose: Working memory and linguistic knowledge are highly intertwined in language tasks. Verbal working memory in particular has been studied as a potential constraint on language performance. This, in turn, highlights the need for a clinical assessment tool that will assist clinicians in understanding individual children's performance in…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second…

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes…

Purpose: Verbal working memory (VWM) delays are commonly found in prelingually deaf youth with cochlear implants (CIs), albeit with considerable interindividual variability. However, little is known about the neurocognitive information-processing mechanisms underlying these delays and how these mechanisms relate to spoken language outcomes. The…

Purpose: Using a new measure of family-level executive functioning (EF; the Family Characteristics Scale [FCS]), we investigated associations between family-level EF, spoken language, and neurocognitive skills in children with hearing loss (HL), compared to children with normal hearing. Method: Parents of children with HL (n = 61) or children with…

Test-taker characteristics (TTCs), or individual difference variables, are known to be a systematic source of variance in language test performance. Although previous research has documented the impact of a range of TTCs on second language (L2) learners' test performance, few of these studies have involved young learners. Given that young L2…

By the end of primary school, students are confronted with expository texts known for their high proportion of domain-specific academic vocabulary words. These words usually comprise Greek or Latin roots in their internal structure. Recent findings showed that knowledge of Greek and Latin roots is related to reading comprehension. However, no…

Listening comprehension is important for daily communication and at school, yet relatively little is known about the variables contributing to listening comprehension, especially in the upper elementary years. The aim of this study was to explore whether vocabulary, verbal memory, but also self-efficacy and self-reported concentration contribute…

This study aimed to profile the sublexical, lexical, and text level language skills, and cognitive processes of a sub-group of children with poor reading comprehension known as poor comprehenders. An assessment protocol was developed to assess each of the components from Perfetti and Stafura's Reading Systems Framework. A comprehensive profile was…