Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following…

Drawing on recent scholarship integrating usage-based linguistics (UBL) and conversation analysis (CA) in the investigation of second language development, this paper reports on a microanalysis tracing one adult learner's recurring, increasingly frequent, and diverse use of the multiword expression "det er sant" (it/that is true) (DES)…

Research examining relations between language skills and social competence has yielded mixed findings. Three meta-analyses investigated links between language skills (overall, receptive, and expressive) and social competence in 2- to 12-year-old children. Data from 130 studies representing 62,120 children (M age at language assessment = 4.70…

Purpose: Children with Down syndrome often have poor speech intelligibility, which can mask expressive language competence; this, in turn, can lead to serious misconceptions about overall competence and intellectual abilities. Although aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can be used to bridge these gaps, children with Down…

Social anxiety is a prevalent issue among college students, often leading to poor academic and psychosocial adjustment. Expressive writing has shown promise as a brief, cost-effective intervention for improving mental and physical health. This study investigated the effects of a 15-min expressive writing session on the social performance of mildly…

Background: The evidence on the effect of age on the receptive and expressive language skills of individuals with Down syndrome is inconclusive. Recent research highlights the relevance of having tools to detect age-related changes in language skills. Method: Data were collected on 45 adults with Down syndrome. All were assessed with the Peabody…

Purpose: The present study explored the extent to which early prelinguistic communication skills predict expressive language in toddlers with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism), who are known to be at high likelihood for autism and language disorder, and a comparison group of toddlers with non-autistic older siblings (Sibs-NA). Method: Participants…

Sonority and its language-universal sonority-sequencing principle (SSP) define an important dimension of phonological grammar which aids in the segmentation of words into syllables (Clements in Pap Lab Phonol 1:283-333, 1990). Studies have yielded contradictory findings on sonority and SSP phonotactics in lexical perception of speech by children…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lecturers wore masks which covered facial cues. In two studies, we examined students' ability to comprehend both factually and inferentially presented information when the speaker's facial cues were or were not available and when delivered with or without expressive prosody. While comprehension was not affected by the…

Reading comprehension is contingent on both oral language comprehension and word-level reading ability, skills that are thought to be intrinsically related in the early school years. However, while previous studies examining bidirectional relationships among oral vocabulary and reading development have generally found an association between word…

Spoken narrative skills are crucial to the social and academic success of young people; however, research indicates that this may be an area of challenge for autistic adolescents. Most previous studies have used narrative elicitation tasks that incorporate visual support, and little is known about how autistic adolescents perform on less…

Purpose: This study evaluates the impact of temporal synchrony between maternal touch and speech on children's early language development. It investigates whether the proportion of word-touch co-occurrence, overlap, and alignment precision in maternal input influences language acquisition, hypothesizing that such synchrony boosts infants'…

Purpose: The identification of child, device, and family/environmental factors that are associated with optimum language outcomes for infants and children using cochlear implants is a high research priority. Understanding the contributions of these factors for an individual child and family may inform clinical decisions about intensity of services…

We investigated the role of bilingual parents' language proficiency in their reports of their children's vocabulary size. Sixty-four Spanish-English bilingual mothers whose L1 was Spanish reported their bilingual children's English and Spanish vocabularies and 37 monolingual L1 English-speaking mothers reported their monolingual children's English…

Purpose: Conversational latency entails the temporal feature of turn-taking, which is understudied in autistic children. The current study investigated the influences of child-based and parental factors on conversational latency in autistic children with heterogeneous spoken language abilities. Method: Participants were 46 autistic children aged…