Maternal Emotional Availability Supports Child Communicative Development Regardless of Child Temperament-Findings From the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study.

The interplay of emotional availability (EA) and child temperament in association with early language development is understudied. We explored associations between maternal EA and infant communicative development and possible moderations by child temperament. Participants were 151 mother-child dyads from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study.

Introducing the Intra-Individual Variability Hypothesis in Explaining Individual Differences in Language Development.

Purpose: Response times (RTs) are commonly used in studying language acquisition. However, previous research utilizing RT in the context of language has largely overlooked the intra-individual variability (IIV) of RTs, which could hold significant information about the processes underlying language acquisition.

Method: We explored the association between language abilities and RT variability in visuomotor tasks using two data sets from previously published studies.

Low-Level Auditory Processing Correlates With Language Abilities: An ERP Study Investigating Sequence Learning and Auditory Processing in School-Aged Children.

Auditory processing and procedural learning deficits have been associated with language learning difficulties. We investigated the relationship of these skills and school-age language abilities in children with and without a history of late talking using auditory event related potentials (ERPs). Late talking (i.

Procedural learning and school-age language outcomes in children with and without a history of late talking.

Background: 'Late talkers' (LTs) are toddlers with late language emergence that cannot be explained by other impairments. It is difficult to predict which of these children continue to present long-term restrictions in language abilities and will later be identified as having a developmental language disorder. Procedural memory weaknesses have been suggested to underlie developmental language disorders, but have not been investigated in LTs.

Non-linguistic cognitive measures as predictors of functionally defined developmental language disorder in monolingual and bilingual children.

Background & Aims: Given that standardized language measures alone are inadequate for identifying functionally defined developmental language disorder (fDLD), this study investigated whether non-linguistic cognitive abilities (procedural learning, motor functions, executive attention, processing speed) can increase the prediction accuracy of fDLD in children in linguistically diverse settings.

Methods & Procedures: We examined non-linguistic cognitive abilities in mono- and bilingual school-aged children (ages 8-12) with and without fDLD. Typically developing (TD) children (14 monolinguals, 12 bilinguals) and children with fDLD (28 monolinguals, 12 bilinguals) completed tasks measuring motor functions, procedural learning, executive attention and processing speed.

Generalized Slowing Rather Than Inhibition Is Associated With Language Outcomes in Both Late Talkers and Children With Typical Early Development.

Purpose While most of the children who are identified as late talkers at the age of 2 years catch up with their peers before school age, some continue to have language difficulties and will later be identified as having developmental language disorder. Our understanding of which children catch up and which do not is limited. The aim of the current study was to find out if inhibition is associated with late talker outcomes at school age.

A systematic review of MRI studies of language development from birth to 2 years of age.

Neurocognitive functions supporting language development start to develop well before first words are spoken during the first years of life. This process coincides with the initial growth spurt of the brain. While the core components of the language network are well characterized in adults and children, the initial neural correlates of language skills are still relatively unknown.

Bilingualism and Processing Speed in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

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. Method We examined processing speed in monolingual and bilingual school-age children (ages 8-12 years) with and without DLD.

Bilingualism and Attention in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose The aim of the current study was to investigate whether dual language experience modulates the efficiency of the 3 attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) in typically developing (TD) children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method We examined the attentional networks in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children (ages 8-12 years) with and without DLD. TD children (35 monolinguals, 23 bilinguals) and children with DLD (17 monolinguals, 9 bilinguals) completed the Attention Network Test (Fan et al.

Characterizing the Motor Skills in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

Background/aims: Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized by deficits in language ability. However, studies have also reported motor impairments in SLI. It has been proposed that the language and motor impairments in SLI share common origins.

Planning Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment Are Reflected in Unnecessarily Awkward Grasps.

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) affects many children, but its symptomatology is still being characterized. An emerging view, which challenges the notion that SLI is specific to language, is that SLI may actually reflect a domain-general deficit in procedural learning. We explored an extension of this hypothesis that a core deficit in SLI involves a domain-general problem in planning.

Bilingualism and Procedural Learning in Typically Developing Children and Children With Language Impairment.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate whether dual language experience affects procedural learning ability in typically developing children and in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: We examined procedural learning in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children (ages 8-12 years) with and without SLI. The typically developing children (35 monolinguals, 24 bilinguals) and the children with SLI (17 monolinguals, 10 bilinguals) completed a serial reaction time task.

Procedural Motor Learning in Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder that affects language and motor development in the absence of a clear cause. An explanation for these impairments is offered by the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), which argues that motor difficulties in SLI are due to deficits in procedural memory. The aim of this study was to test the PDH by examining the procedural motor learning abilities of children with and without SLI.

Processing Speed Measures as Clinical Markers for Children With Language Impairment.

Purpose: This study investigated the relative utility of linguistic and nonlinguistic processing speed tasks as predictors of language impairment (LI) in children across 2 time points.

Method: Linguistic and nonlinguistic reaction time data, obtained from 131 children (89 children with typical development [TD] and 42 children with LI; 74 boys and 57 girls) were analyzed in the 3rd and 8th grades. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and likelihood ratios were used to compare the diagnostic usefulness of each task.

Information processing speed as a predictor of IQ in children with and without specific language impairment in grades 3 and 8.

Purpose: This study investigated (1) whether nonlinguistic processing speed predicts nonverbal IQ in TD children and children with SLI and (2) if the proposed relationship is different at two time points.

Method: The participants consisted of a subset of a longitudinal dataset, 55 typically developing children and 55 children with SLI. Children completed four nonverbal speed tasks and four subtests of the WISC-III.

Gesture-speech integration in children with specific language impairment.

Background: Previous research suggests that speakers are especially likely to produce manual communicative gestures when they have relative ease in thinking about the spatial elements of what they are describing, paired with relative difficulty organizing those elements into appropriate spoken language. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit poor expressive language abilities together with within-normal-range nonverbal IQs.

Aims: This study investigated whether weak spoken language abilities in children with SLI influence their reliance on gestures to express information.

Effects of children's working memory capacity and processing speed on their sentence imitation performance.

Background: More limited working memory capacity and slower processing for language and cognitive tasks are characteristics of many children with language difficulties. Individual differences in processing speed have not consistently been found to predict language ability or severity of language impairment. There are conflicting views on whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable abilities.

Phonological and lexical effects in verbal recall by children with specific language impairments.

Background & Aims: The present study examined how phonological and lexical knowledge influences memory in children with specific language impairments (SLI). Previous work showed recall advantages for typical adults and children due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency and a recall disadvantage due to phonological similarity among words. While children with SLI have well-documented memory difficulties, it is not clear whether these language knowledge factors also influence recall in this population.

Do statistical segmentation abilities predict lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic abilities in children with and without SLI?

This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5-12;3), twenty children with SLI and twenty with typical development. Children completed Saffran's statistical word segmentation task, a lexical-phonological access task (gating task), and a word definition task.

Investigating sentence processing and language segmentation in explaining children's performance on a sentence-span task.

Background: Children with poor language abilities tend to perform poorly on verbal working memory tasks. This result has been interpreted as evidence that limitations in working memory capacity may interfere with the development of a mature linguistic system. However, it is possible that language abilities, such as the efficiency of sentence processing and the ability to segment language, directly influence performance on common working memory tasks.

Beyond capacity limitations II: effects of lexical processes on word recall in verbal working memory tasks in children with and without specific language impairment.

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of lexical processes on target word recall in sentence span tasks in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: Participants were 42 children (ages 8;2-12;3 [years;months]): 21 with SLI and 21 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children completed a sentence span task in which target words to be recalled varied in word frequency and neighborhood density.

Explaining lexical-semantic deficits in specific language impairment: the role of phonological similarity, phonological working memory, and lexical competition.

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated potential explanations for sparse lexical-semantic representations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers. The role of auditory perception, phonological working memory, and lexical competition were investigated.

Method: Participants included 32 children (ages 8;5-12;3 [years;months]): Sixteen children with SLI and 16 typically developing age- and nonverbal IQ-matched peers (CA).

Knowledge of mathematical equivalence in children with specific language impairment: insights from gesture and speech.

Purpose: This study investigated understanding of mathematical equivalence in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: A total of 34 children (ages 8;1 [years;months] to 11;7), including 9 with expressive SLI (E-SLI), 8 with expressive and receptive SLI (ER-SLI), and 17 age-matched typically developing (TD) children completed addition and mathematical equivalence problems. The problem-solving strategies revealed in solutions and in gestural and verbal explanations were coded.

Gesture-speech integration in narrative: Are children less redundant than adults?

Speakers sometimes express information in gestures that they do not express in speech. In this research, we developed a system that could be used to assess the redundancy of gesture and speech in a narrative task. We then applied this system to examine whether children and adults produce non-redundant gesture-speech combinations at similar rates.

Lexical representations in children with SLI: evidence from a frequency-manipulated gating task.

Purpose: This study investigated lexical representations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing, chronological age-matched (CA) peers on a frequency-manipulated gating task. The study tested the hypothesis that children with SLI have holistic phonological representations of words, that is, that children with SLI would exhibit smaller effects of neighborhood density on gating durations than CA peers and that children with SLI would be as efficient as CA peers in accessing high-frequency words but that they would differ from their age-matched peers in accessing low-frequency words.

Method: Thirty-two children (ages 8;5-12;3 [years;months]) participated: 16 children with SLI and 16 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ.