Purpose: Nonword repetition (NWR) has been described as a clinical marker of developmental language disorder (DLD), as NWR tasks consistently discriminate between DLD and typical development (TD) cross-linguistically, with Cantonese as the only reported exception. This study reexamines whether NWR is able to generate TD/DLD group differences in…

Purpose: This study examined the language and nonverbal inhibitory control skills of Italian monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) preschoolers with Italian as their second language and of age-matched monolingual and bilingual peers with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Four groups of preschoolers were enrolled: 30 TD…

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been shown to be excellent indicators of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there is still no consensus about which core ability they measure: language vs. Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM) and Verbal Working Memory (WM). Moreover, very few studies have investigated whether variables predicting SR…

Some reports suggest that there is an increase in the number of children identified as having developmental language impairment (Bercow, 2008). yet resource issues have meant that many speech and language therapy services have compromised provision in some way. Thus, efficient ways of identifying need and prioritizing intervention are required.…

Italian developmental dyslexic readers show a striking length effect and have been hypothesised to rely mostly on nonlexical reading. Our experiments tested this hypothesis by assessing whether or not the deficit underlying dyslexia is specific to lexical reading. The effects of lexicality, word frequency and length were investigated in the same…

The purpose of the present study was twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which Chinese dyslexic children experience deficits in phonological and orthographic processing skills and (b) to examine if Chinese dyslexia is associated with deficits in Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processing. A total of 27 Grade 4 children…

The comparison of cognitive and linguistic skills in individuals with developmental disorders is fraught with methodological and psychometric difficulties. In this paper, we illustrate some of these issues by comparing the receptive vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal reasoning abilities of 41 children with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder in…