A study of J. Locke's theory of specific language impairment (SLI) found that children (n=10) with SLI who were limited to single-word utterances showed deficits in their lexical comprehension, supporting Locke's proposal. A second study found that children with SLI who had reached the grammatical stage of development showed age-appropriate…

This study examined Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL) of novel vocabulary by 88 primary school-age children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Among normally developing children, results documented a robust ability to learn words in the early school years. Children with SLI demonstrated significantly less word-learning ability…

This study examined qualitative developments in 96 school-aged children's expressible knowledge of 434 words (selected to represent dictionary contents). Developmental changes were found in proportions of high quality definitions, semantic and syntactic form, effects of parts of speech, morphological composition, and lexical organization. Results…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…

This study, with 161 children with and without language learning problems, tested the hypothesis that as children's language development matures, factor-analytic structural changes occur that are associated with measurements of fine-grained auditory discrimination, receptive vocabulary, receptive language, speech production, and 3 performance…