Quantifier spreading (Q-spreading), children's incorrect falsification of a universally-quantified sentence based on an 'extra-object' picture, may persist beyond childhood, and children adhere to Q-spreading without changing responses throughout testing. We examined the error patterns across wider age groups (aged 4-79) with a picture-sentence…

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is "medial wh-question" errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., "What do you think who the cat chased?" from…

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to…

Children's picture books, both fiction and non-fiction, play a vital role in introducing the reader to the natural world. Here we examine the representation of turtles, terrapins and tortoises (Testudines) in 204 English language picture books and find a mean of 3.9 (SD 9.1) basic biological errors per book. Only 83 (40.7%) of the examined books…

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared…

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD…

Previous word learning studies suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder may have difficulty understanding pictorial symbols. Here we investigate the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder and language-matched typically developing children to contextualize symbolic information communicated by pictures in a search task that did…

This study evaluated whether core vocabulary intervention (CVT) improved single word speech accuracy, consistency and intelligibility in four 9-11-year-old children with profound sensori-neural deafness fitted with cochlear implants and/or digital hearing aids. Their speech was characterized by inconsistent production of different error forms for…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate consistent comprehension problems. The present study investigated whether these problems are driven primarily by structural complexity or length. A picture-sentence matching task was presented to 30 children: (1) 10 children with SLI, (2) 10 comprehension-matched children with typical…

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap…

Three studies investigated the comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle "only" by children and adults. Contrary to previous findings, two of the studies found that young children made errors predominantly by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to…

This study examined the interaction between working memory and language comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI), focusing on the function of the central executive component and its interaction with the phonological loop (A. D. Baddeley, 1986) in complex working memory tasks. Thirteen children with SLI and 13 age-matched…