Literature is replete with the studies focusing on the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language receptive skills. However, the relationship between the aspects of vocabulary knowledge and productive skills in general, and the speaking performance in particular has remained scanty in the related literature. This paper examined the relationship between knowledge of L2 vocabulary size at di...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have suggested that language is affected in infants of diabetic mothers, yet there have been no systematic investigations to address this question. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to compare infants of diabetic mothers and controls on language outcomes from ages 18 months to 7 years. METHODS This was a case-control longitudinal design with 2 birth cohorts: 1835 singletons...

PURPOSE The authors examined the effects of conceptual scoring on the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals on standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary measures in English and Spanish. METHOD Participants included 40 English-speaking monolingual children, 39 simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children, and 19 sequential bilingual children, ages 5-7. The children co...

Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder in which, it is claimed, language abilities are relatively strong despite mild to moderate mental retardation. Such claims have, in turn, been interpreted as evidence either for modular preservation of language or for atypical constraints on cognitive development. However, this review demonstrates that there is, in fact, little evidence that syntax, ...

Statistical learning (SL) is believed to enable language acquisition by allowing individuals to learn regularities within linguistic input. However, neural evidence supporting a direct relationship between SL and language ability is scarce. We investigated whether there are associations between event-related potential (ERP) correlates of SL and language abilities while controlling for the gener...

PURPOSE To evaluate whether the validity of the Receptive Vocabulary scale of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for Infants (MCDI-I; L. Fenson et al., 1991), a parent-report measure of early vocabulary, could be improved for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by removing items that are biased. METHOD Logistic regression was used to identify biased items. Items are c...

BACKGROUND Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with this disorder have relative strengths in vocabula...

ABSTRACT This study compared the receptive and expressive language profiles of verbally expressive children and adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) and those with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and examined the extent to which these profiles reliably differentiate the diagnostic groups. A total of twenty-four verbal participants with DS (mean age: 12 years), twenty-two verbal participants with FXS (m...

This investigation examined the Spanish and English receptive vocabulary and language comprehension abilities of bilingual preschoolers who attended Head Start over a two-year period. It was hypothesised that bilingual children's development would follow linear trajectories and that the development of children who were only exposed to Spanish in the home prior to school entry would differ from ...