Background: Children who stutter have the right to express their views and be heard. However, in research on stuttering, attention tends to focus mainly on parental and adult perspectives. By actively engaging with children's viewpoints, we can enhance our understanding of their distinct needs and capabilities. This, in turn, enables the…

This study investigates the speech rate of Cypriot Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) as well as the effect of age and gender. The participants were 16 children with DLD ages 4 years 11 months to 8 years 1 month and 22 children with typical language development (TLD) ages 4 years 5 months to 8 years 7 months. Both…

Purpose: This article describes the developmental trajectories of four communication-related parameters (i.e., intelligibility, articulation rate, fluency, and communicative efficiency) in a cross-sectional study of typically developing children between 3 and 9 years. The four target parameters were related to auditory-perceptual parameters of…

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1-1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not…

Infants from low-socioeconomic status (SES) households hear a projected 30 million fewer words than their higher-SES peers. In a recent study, Hirsh-Pasek et al. (Psychological Science, 2015; 26: 1071) found that in a low-income sample, fluency and connectedness in exchanges between caregivers and toddlers predicted child language a year later…

Children's frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than…

Background: Identifying risk and protective factors for language development informs interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Maternal responsive and intrusive communicative behaviours are associated with language development. Mother-child interaction quality may influence how children use these behaviours in language…

Deficits in pragmatic language are central to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we investigate common ground, a pragmatic language skill in which speakers adjust the contents of their speech based on their interlocutor's perceived knowledge, in adolescents with ASD and typical development (TD), using an experimental narrative paradigm.…

Lexical access tasks are designed to measure efficiency of lexical access, but task demands and methods vary greatly. Many lexical access tasks do not account for confounding factors including competence in other linguistic abilities. In this study, preschoolers were given two lexical access tasks. In the single-category naming (SCN) task,…

Discusses some of the problems of language education and concludes that during the middle school years, children are potentially very aware of language and receptive to new ways of exploring and exploiting it. More needs to be learned about this critical stage of language development. (JM)

A cross-sectional research study and a longitudinal research study failed to replicate previous research findings that indicated a linear relationship between age and mean length of utterance during the preschool years. Instead, a deceleration in age curves, particularly beyond about 36 months, was observed in each sample. (Author/CB)

A study examined the ability of 10 two-year-olds to produce minimal pairs of novel trisyllabic words with primary stress on the first or second syllables. The syllables contained dissimilar or similar vowel contrasts to determine if segments affected omission. Omission was more frequent for the first syllable of weak-strong-weak word pairs.…

The semantic differential technique was used to reveal the dimensions describing 4 adults' judgments of 140 conversation samples involving preschool-aged children. Analysis of the association between six speech/language behaviors and judgments on dynamism, maturity, and appeal found that level of phonological accuracy was the only speech/language…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…