The Role of Language in Nonlinguistic Stimuli: Comparing Inhibition in Children With Language Impairment.

Purpose: There is conflicting evidence regarding if and how a deficit in executive function may be associated with developmental language impairment (LI). Nonlinguistic stimuli are now frequently used when testing executive function to avoid a language confound. However, it is possible that increased stimulus processing demands for nonlinguistic stimuli may also compound the complexity of the relationship between executive function and LI.

The role of nonverbal working memory in morphosyntactic processing by children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders.

Background: Both children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to have difficulties with grammatical processing. A comparison of these two populations with neurodevelopmental disorders was undertaken to examine similarities and differences in the mechanisms that may underlie grammatical processing. Research has shown that working memory (WM) is recruited during grammatical processing.

Parent Telegraphic Speech Use and Spoken Language in Preschoolers With ASD.

Purpose: There is considerable controversy regarding whether to use telegraphic or grammatical input when speaking to young children with language delays, including children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study examined telegraphic speech use in parents of preschoolers with ASD and associations with children's spoken language 1 year later.

Method: Parent-child dyads (n = 55) participated when children were, on average, 3 (Time 1) and 4 years old (Time 2).

Use of the ADOS for assessing spontaneous expressive language in young children with ASD: a comparison of sampling contexts.

Purpose: The current study compared the spontaneous expressive language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across multiple language sampling contexts: the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 1999) and play with an examiner or parent.

Method: Participants were children with ASD (n = 63; 55 boys) with a mean age of 45 months (SD = 3.94, range = 37-53).

Lexical and grammatical skills in toddlers on the autism spectrum compared to late talking toddlers.

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25- month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early lexical–grammatical relationships. Findings revealed that semantic categories of words— including psychological state terms—used by toddlers on the autism spectrum were very similar to those of late talkers.

Use of speaker intent and grammatical cues in fast-mapping by adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that action verbs would be harder to fast-map than nouns.

Method: Twenty participants with DS, aged 12-18 years, and 19 TD participants, aged 3-6 years, were matched on syntax comprehension and engaged in 4 fast-mapping tasks.

Sampling context affects MLU in the language of adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The authors describe the procedures used to explain an unexpected finding that adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) had a lower mean length of utterance (MLU) than typically developing (TD) children in interviews without picture support, but not in narratives supported by wordless picture books. They hypothesize that the picture support of the narrative context increased the MLU for the group with DS alone.

Method: Adolescents with DS (n = 14) and TD children (n = 14) matched for receptive syntax narrated picture storybooks and participated in interviews.

Effect of memory support and elicited production on fast mapping of new words by adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined predictors of individual difference within groups.

Method: The ability of 19 adolescents with DS to fast map new noun vocabulary was compared with 18 TD children matched for syntax comprehension.

Sentence comprehension in adolescents with Down syndrome and typically developing children: role of sentence voice, visual context, and auditory-verbal short-term memory.

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with Down syndrome (DS), age 12 to 21 years, and 19 typically developing (TD) children, age 3 to 5 years, matched on syntax comprehension, as measured by TACL-3 Subtests II and III. Of the 5 dependent measures of comprehension, auditory-verbal short-term memory accounted for significant amounts of variance in 4; group membership, 1 (semantic role assignment); and visual short-term memory, 0.