Purpose: The aims of this study were (a) to evaluate the convergent validity of the Language Use Inventory (LUI) with measures of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptoms, language, and social skills and (b) to assess discriminant validity of the LUI with measures of nonlanguage skills, including daily living skills and motor development. Method:…

Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point…

Despite considerable interest in children's ability to provide temporal information, there remain many unanswered questions about what children can provide and how to elicit this information. In Study 1, children (N = 147, aged 5 to 10 years) participated in an activity session. Either shortly after or 1 day later, children completed an interview…

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's…

Purpose: In the current study, we examined the alignment of language choice of bilingual parent-child dyads in play-based interactions. Method: Forty-four bilingual Spanish-English parent-child dyads participated in a 10-min naturalistic free-play interaction to determine whether bilingual children and their parents respond to each other in the…

Purpose: To understand the ways in which autistic Latinx children experience disparities in diagnosis, healthcare, and receipt of specialty services. Methods: 417 individuals who identified as Latinx caregivers of autistic children who were members of the same integrated healthcare system in Northern California were surveyed. Responses were…

Wellbeing is explicitly mentioned in the United Nations Rights of the Child, and governments, humanitarian organisations, scientific and educational research internationally call for a focus on child wellbeing in the early years. Early childhood education policies, pedagogy and practice reflect this call, with curriculum frameworks, regulations…

Reading comprehension skills, which involve numerous executive functions (EFs), are crucial for the academic success of school-aged children. Because children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have difficulties with language comprehension and EFs, achieving reading comprehension may be challenging for them. This study evaluated…

This study tested the role of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)'s conversational expansion in mediating between mothers' descriptive language and children with ASD's conversational repair, and whether this mediation was moderated by the relative complexity of mother-child language. Videos of forty children with ASD engaging in various…

We investigated older children's (7-12 years) ability to comprehend "before" and "after" sentences. Results found that three factors that influence pre-school aged children's learning of these words continues to influence older children's comprehension. Specifically, children's accuracy is improved when the events can be…

Objective: Pragmatics can be defined as the appropriate use of language in social interactions. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) exhibit difficulties in pragmatic language (PL), but the nature and sources of these difficulties have not been fully investigated yet. The purpose of…

Blind adults display language-specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in "co-speech gesture"--gesturing with speech--but not in "silent gesture"--gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult-like…

Purpose: This report compares device use in a cohort of Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children who are deaf and hard of hearing, including children fitted with traditional hearing aids, cochlear implants (CIs), and/or bone-conduction hearing devices. Method: Participants were 84 Spanish-English bilingual children and 85 English…

So much emphasis is placed these days on measuring the performance of pupils that it is difficult to imagine the social space of the classroom being used for any other purpose. But our intention in this essay is not to succumb to pessimism about the surveillance imposed by standards-based reforms. Such bleak determinism can be challenged by…

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using "zed" instead of "zee"), but do they flexibly…