The oral language proficiency of students in early education is crucial as teachers draw on this as a resource when developing literacy. There is a need to better understand what this oral language resource consists of at school entry, particularly the diversity amongst children so as to address inequalities. This article reports a study on a key…

Purpose: This study examined vocabulary profiles in young cochlear implant (CI) recipients and in children with normal hearing (NH) matched on receptive vocabulary size to improve our understanding of young CI recipients' acquisition of word categories (e.g., common nouns or closed-class words). Method: We compared receptive and expressive…

Purpose: Pragmatics is receiving much attention in both the fields of developmental and clinical psychology; however, there is a dearth of instruments to assess pragmatic abilities specifically among young toddler-age children. The aim of the current study was to test the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Language Use Inventory…

Enhancing communication performance skills may help children with Down Syndrome (DS) to expand their opportunities for participation in daily life. It is a clinical challenge for speech-language pathologists (SLP) to disentangle various mechanisms that contribute to the language and communication problems that children with DS encounter. Without…

Relations between bilingual children's patterns of conversational code-switching (responding to one language with another), the balance of their dual language input, and their expressive and receptive proficiency in two languages were examined in 115 2½-year-old simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. Children were more likely to…

Background: There is a dearth of assessments of sign language development in young deaf children. This study gathered age-related scores from a sample of deaf native signing children using an adapted version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Fenson et al., 1994). Method: Parental reports on children's receptive and expressive signing were collected…