Background: Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts various aspects of children's language abilities, including the processing of inflectional morphology. Prior research suggests that children with DLD exhibit deficits in processing speed and sensitivity to grammatical inflections, yet the relationship between these deficits remains unclear.…

Purpose: This study examined the influences of bilingualism and developmental language disorder (DLD) on nonverbal processing speed. DLD is associated with slower processing speed, but the extent to which slowing extends to bilingual populations is not established. The possible presence of bilingual cognitive effects could also lead to faster…

Purpose: Learning novel words, including the specific phonemes that make up word forms, is a struggle for many individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD). Building robust representations of words includes encoding during periods of input and consolidation between periods of input. The primary purpose of the current study is to…

We integrated data from a newborn hearing screening database and a preschool disability database to examine the relationship between newborn click evoked auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and developmental disabilities. This sample included children with developmental delay (n = 2992), speech impairment (SI, n = 905), language impairment (n =…

Purpose: This study examined procedural and declarative learning and consolidation abilities in adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) relative to their typical language (TD) peers. Method: A total of 100 young adults (age 18-24 years) with (n = 21) and without (n = 79) DLD participated across two sites. Performance measures on a…

Background: Children with dyslexia and/or developmental language disorder (hereafter children with DDLD) have been reported to retrieve fewer words than their typically developing (TD) peers in semantic fluency tasks. It is not known whether this retrieval difficulty can be attributed to the semantic structure of their lexicon being poor or,…

Purpose: For bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), language treatment response is the degree to which an individual child progresses in both of their languages. Understanding what predicts language treatment response for an individual child can help clinicians plan treatment more effectively. Method: This study is a…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have difficulty with word learning. Recent studies have shown that incorporating retrieval practice provides a significant benefit to this learning. However, we have not yet discovered the best balance between the amount of retrieval and the amount of study (hearing the word in the…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates processing speed in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). We also examined whether processing speed predicted vocabulary and sentence-level abilities in receptive and expressive modalities.…

Purpose: The nature of the relationship between memory and sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD) has been unclear. We present a novel perspective that highlights the relational influences of fluid intelligence, controlled attention, working memory (WM), and long-term memory (LTM) on sentence…

Background: It has been established that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties understanding spoken language. Understanding reflexive and clitic pronouns is vital to establishing reference-based inference, but it is as yet unclear whether such constructions pose specific difficulties for those with ASD. Pronoun…

Purpose: This study compared performance on the Syllable Repetition Task (SRT) by preschoolers with diverse speech and language abilities to identify underlying impairments in speech processes. Method: Three groups of 13 children ages 4 and 5 years with (a) typically developing (TD) speech and language, (b) speech sound disorder (SSD), and (c)…

Purpose: We assessed the potential direct and indirect (mediated) influences of 4 cognitive mechanisms we believe are theoretically relevant to canonical and noncanonical sentence comprehension of school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: One hundred seventeen children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is defined by persistent difficulties with language, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it is also associated with domain-general and nonverbal information-processing deficits. However, the interconnections between cognitive functions, both nonverbal and language related, are still unclear.…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether the word-learning challenges associated with developmental language disorder (DLD) result from encoding or retention deficits. Method In Study 1, 59 postsecondary students with DLD and 60 with normal development (ND) took the California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition, Adult Version…