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…

This study addresses the question as to what cognitive abilities influence performance on article choice and direct object scrambling in high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Schaeffer (2016/2018) shows that a group of 27 high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with ASD, aged 5-14, overgenerates the…

This study investigates syntax in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), its parallelism with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its relation to other aspects of cognition. We focus on (1) 3rd person accusative clitic (ACC3) production, a clinical marker of SLI hypothesized to relate to WM, and (2) 1st person accusative clitic (ACC1) production,…

The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level…