What Children with Developmental Language Disorder Teach Us About Cross-Situational Word Learning.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) served as a test case for determining the role of extant vocabulary knowledge, endogenous attention, and phonological working memory abilities in cross-situational word learning. First-graders (M = 7 years; 3 months), 44 with typical development (TD) and 28 with DLD, completed a cross-situational word-learning task comprised six cycles, followed by retention tests and independent assessments of attention, memory, and vocabulary. Children with DLD scored lower than those with TD on all measures of learning and retention, a performance gap that emerged in the first cycle of the cross-situational protocol and that we attribute to weaknesses in initial encoding.

Children's language abilities predict success in remote communication contexts.

Remote communicative contexts are part of everyday social, familial, and academic interactions for the modern child. We investigated the ability of second-graders to engage in remote discourse, and we determined whether language ability, theory of mind, and shy temperament predicted their success. Fifty 7-to-9-year-old monolingual English speakers with a wide range of language abilities participated in standardized testing and an expository discourse task in which they taught two adults to solve the Tower of London, one in an audiovisual condition to simulate video chat and a second in an audio-only condition to simulate phone communication.