Bilingual children's language skills are strongly influenced by exposure to each of their languages, among other linguistic, environmental, and cognitive factors. In the speech and language therapy clinic, it is difficult to disentangle developmental language disorders from insufficient exposure. Dynamic assessment, which directly tests the learning potential of children, offers a promising solution for this dilemma. This study compares the clinical potential of two dynamic assessment situations, varying amount of adult mediation (autonomous computer game vs. interactive story reading with graduated cues), as well as item types (nouns, verbs, and inflections in sentences) and linguistic modalities and tasks (comprehension - word picture matching and acceptability judgement, production - free recall and picture naming). Forty-nine French monolingual and French-Portuguese bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder, aged 5;0 to 7;11 years, were include in the final analyses. Using Lasso regressions, we were able to determine which variables best explain the presence of disorder. A combination of all item types and predominantly receptive tasks, mostly from the interactive situation, was retained for very high classification accuracy (up to 100% sensitivity and 96% specificity). Language status showed no influence, which encourages the use of dynamic assessment in the context of speech and language assessment with bilingual children. This study adds to evidence that dynamic assessment is a promising task for identifying bilingual and monolingual children with developmental language disorder, particularly when the situation involves interaction with graduated cues.

Dynamic assessment is typically used for diagnostic and baseline purposes; however, the current study explored expanding the use of dynamic assessment as a curriculum-based measure to additionally capture teaching moments and observe intervention elements during treatment of speech sound disorder (NCT06075303). Teaching moments occur when an SLT presents an antecedent, the child produces a behaviour, and the SLT responds with a consequence related to accuracy; yet, little is known about the characteristics of these elements that are the most essential for improving treatment outcomes. To address this gap, we used the Glaspey Dynamic Assessment of Phonology's scoring system to establish the goal, code teaching moments, describe procedural issues, and evaluate children's skill development. The participants included two English-speaking boys, ages three and six, with speech sound disorder. A modified cycles approach was administered by an SLT and a student clinician with two blocks of targets (minimally and moderately adaptable). Results indicated that coding with dynamic assessment was successfully used for tracking changes within the teaching moments and provided a more complete perspective of treatment efficacy when combined with outcome measures, yet more research is needed to establish goals with dynamic assessment. Both children demonstrated progress in a short period of time, though Participant 1 made more significant gains, which may be attributed to many elements including treatment intensity, target selection, clinician variables, or client variables. Overall, this preliminary research supports that dynamic assessment may lead to dynamic intervention, thus bridging assessment and treatment practices.

Academic writing is a complex task involving microstructure (linguistic-level) and macrostructure (coherence structure) indices. Our goal was to examine the contribution of an academic writing intervention programme among students with intellectual disability at the microstructure and macrostructure levels while characterising the learning curves. Six students with mild intellectual disability studying for a BA (MCA = 30.43, MIQ = 69.17) participated in a spiral intervention programme of 32 lessons focusing on improving paragraph complexity and text structure measured at five time-points. Microstructure improvement in number of words, sentences, paragraphs, words per paragraph, lexical density, adjectives along with macrostructure improvement in text-paragraph structure, global-local linkage were found. A rapid increase in macrostructure indices was observed between the first and second testing points, after which a ceiling effect was reached. Concurrently, microstructure indices demonstrated a slower, more gradual learning curve throughout the intervention period. The discussion will focus on the improvement patterns in microstructure-macrostructure indices and the various learning curves observed. It explores the implications of these findings for cognitive modifiability in adults with intellectual disability and the potential of tailored academic writing interventions in post-secondary education programmes.

This paper reports Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) values for normophonic English-speaking adults living in Ireland. A hundred vocally healthy adults (50 females, 50 males) aged 18-55 were audio recorded producing a series of speech tasks (sustained vowels, connected speech). Fifty-eight speakers in the 18-24 age group were recorded twice: remotely, using their mobile phones and onsite, in controlled recording setup. Forty-two speakers in the 25-55 age group were recorded only remotely, using their mobile phones. CPP values were extracted automatically, with and without voice activity detection (VAD), using a Praat plug-in. Linear mixed effect model analyses were conducted to establish the effect of speaker gender, age, speech task and recording conditions on CPP values. The results suggest strong significant effect of speech task. Sustained vowel [a] was found to have the highest CPP. In other speech tasks CPP values were found to decrease as the number of voiceless obstruents in them increases. We found moderate significant effect of gender: in sustained vowels only CPP > CPP. No effect of age was found. Recording condition had significant, but rather small effect, and its direction was different for CPP (Onsite < Remote) and CPP (Onsite > Remote). CPP values are higher than CPP ones regardless of the speaker gender. The choice of CPP extraction method affects mainly the speech tasks containing voiceless obstruents (CPP > CPP). The findings reported here contribute to the growing body of knowledge about normative CPP values and may serve as a reference in clinical voice assessment.

To investigate whether children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) exhibit increased elevation and retraction of the tongue dorsum. Two quantitative metrics of tongue dorsum activity: Dorsum excursion Index (DEI) and Tongue Constraint Position Index (TCPI) were captured using mid-sagittal images of the tongue obtained from Ultrasound Tongue Imaging. Participants: Six children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI), six children with palate (w/wo cleft lip) without velopharyngeal insufficiency (wo VPI) and ten typically developing children aged 6-15 repeated six different consonants in aCa and iCi contexts five times. A linear mixed-effect model was used to examine the response variables across three groups. Overall, DEI was not significantly higher in the VPI group than in the other two groups. Also, TCPI was not significantly lower in the cleft palate group (VPI and wo VPI). However, significant differences were detected between certain phonetic contexts in the VPI group. In addition, a significant interaction between group and consonant was found in the context of /i/. These findings suggest that the presence of VPI may not lead to a uniform increase in tongue dorsum elevation or retracted position across all speech sounds. Rather, the articulatory behaviours of children with VPI may be influenced by the specific phonetic context and individual variability.

Little is known about the developmental trajectories in children who do not use canonical babbling (CB) at 10 months. The aim was to examine how speech, language, cognitive and motor abilities developed in children without CB. For 15 children identified as not having CB, consonant production, expressive vocabulary and general development were assessed at 12, 18 and 36 months from audio-video recordings. Twelve (79%) children still lacked CB at 12 months. At 18 months, six (40%) had parent-reported expressive vocabulary results below the 10th percentile, and two (14%) did not use dental/alveolar stops. The percentage of consonants correct for the group was at the level of peers at 36 months (89%, SD 0.17), but the group had fewer established target consonants than age norms. Most children had a small expressive vocabulary in comparison with Swedish age norms for younger children as well as with age-matched norms for other Nordic languages. The general development (Bayley-III) for three children (21%) who did not use speech was 1-2 SD below the average range in at least one domain (cognitive, language or motor), but the results for the whole group were within the average range. In conclusion, the heterogeneity in early consonant development in the study group resembles that of children in clinical groups with known risk for speech and language difficulties and the expressive vocabulary resembles that of children with delayed expressive vocabulary. For about one-fifth of the children, the absence of canonical babbling at age 10 months could be seen as an early sign of a more comprehensive developmental disability.

Inferential language is an essential aspect of narrative storytelling. It offers not only details about events such as cause and effect and character cognition (e.g. intentions, actions, and reactions) but other evaluative and descriptive language. Previous studies have shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD, previously also termed as Specific Language Impairment, SLI) exhibit weakness in narrative development, and such weakness is suggested to be unlikely to be resolved over time. However, studies that have focused on the inferential language use in narratives of adolescents with DLD are almost non-existent, and it is unclear whether inferential language use by adolescents with DLD would remain problematic or achieve close-to-normal performance. To address this issue, we compared the use of inferential language in the oral narratives 19 adolescents with DLD (Mean age = 14.3; SD = 0.64) and 19 adolescents with typical language development (TLD; Mean age = 14.0; SD = 0.50). Each transcribed narrative was coded for inferences across character actions/attempts, internal states, causality, character dialogue and other inferences. Results indicated that the two groups performed similarly in all measures except for assigning possessive expressions. Our results suggest that adolescents with DLD may approximate their typical language development (TLD) peers in terms of the inferential language use in oral narratives.

Non-Word Repetition (NWR) tasks effectively identify language impairments and assess phonological skills across diverse populations and languages, including Arabic. Prior research revealed heterogeneity of performance in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on NWR tasks. The current study is the first to evaluate phonological skills of Palestinian-Arabic-speaking children with and without ASD, employing a Palestinian-Arabic NWR task. A total of 142 Palestinian-Arabic-speaking children, aged 5-11 participated in the study, including 75 children with Typical Language Development (TLD) and 67 children with ASD. The NWR task included 18 non-words of varying length (1-4 syllables) and complexity (with and without consonant clusters). Quantitative analysis examined the effects of length and phonological complexity on the NWR accuracy scores in children with TLD and ASD. Error pattern analysis accounting for phoneme and syllable substitutions/deletions/additions and lexicalisations aimed to shed light on the phonological representations of children with and without ASD. Within the ASD group, two subgroups emerged: 72% exhibited age-appropriate NWR performance, while 28% showed performance at-risk for phonological impairment. Non-word length, rather than complexity, significantly influenced the children's performance. Consonant substitution was the most frequent error pattern across all groups. On the theoretical side, these findings extend cross-linguistic evidence of phonological skill heterogeneity in children with ASD to Arabic-speaking children. Additionally, they highlight an overall delayed but qualitatively similar pattern of phonological development in children with ASD. On the clinical side, results underscore the importance of comprehensive language assessment in children with ASD.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with a range of morphosyntactic skills, particularly with tense and subject - verb agreement. Many studies have examined verb-morphology production in children with DLD. We extend this line of research by profiling verb-morphology comprehension in 67 monolingual Saudi Arabic-speaking children, comprising 33 with DLD ( = 61 months,  = 10.70), and 34 age-matched typically developing (TD) children ( = 63 months,  = 8.94). Children completed a novel picture selection task developed to assess their comprehension of verb tense, gender agreement, and number agreement. Children with DLD scored significantly lower than TD children on the verb morphology comprehension task. They showed greater difficulty identifying verb tense forms, particularly future tense. They also demonstrated lower accuracy in identifying subject-verb agreement in general, with specific difficulty in comprehending masculine verbs, and singular verbs. These findings were compared with production verb-morphology data from previous Arabic studies. Overall, this study highlights the challenges experienced by Arabic-speaking children with DLD in comprehending verb morphology, particularly tense and subject-verb agreement inflections. These findings can be used to tailor appropriate assessment designs and interventions for an Arabic-speaking DLD population.

Analysing spontaneous speech in individuals experiencing fluency difficulties holds potential for diagnosing speech and language disorders, including Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). Dysfluency in the spontaneous speech of patients with PPA has mostly been described in terms of abnormal pausing behaviour, but the temporal features related to speech have drawn little attention. This study compares speech-related fluency parameters in the three main variants of PPA and in typical speech. Forty-three adults participated in this research, thirteen with the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA), ten with the non-fluent variant (nfvPPA), nine with the semantic variant (svPPA), and eleven who were healthy age-matched adults. Participants' fluency was assessed through a picture description task from which 42 parameters were computed including syllable duration, speaking pace, the duration of speech chunks (i.e. interpausal units, IPU), and the number of linguistic units per IPU and per second. The results showed that each PPA variant exhibited abnormal speech characteristics reflecting various underlying factors, from motor speech deficits to higher-level issues. Out of the 42 parameters considered, 37 proved useful for characterising dysfluency in the three main PPA variants and 35 in distinguishing among them. Therefore, taking into account not only pausing behaviour but also temporal speech parameters can provide a fuller understanding of dysfluency in PPA. However, no single parameter by itself sufficed to distinguish one PPA group from the other two, further evidence that dysfluency is not dichotomous but rather multidimensional, and that complementary multiparametric analyses are needed.

Dynamic assessment (DA) is a tool used to assess children's learning potential. Research on English-speaking children indicates that DA effectively diagnoses language disorders in monolingual and bilingual children. However, few DAs have been developed for French-speaking children. This study aimed to examine the validity of a dynamic phonological awareness task for differentiating French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Thirty-eight monolingual and bilingual children, aged 4-8 years, 23 with typical development (TD) and 15 with DLD, participated in the study. They performed a dynamic phoneme segmentation task, in which graduated cues were provided. Children were also administered a nonword repetition (NWR) task, and a modifiability scale, in which the examiner rated the child's responsivity during the task. Statistical analyses examined what factors influenced dynamic task performance, and calculated the sensitivity and specificity of the tests. Results indicated that four factors emerged as significant in a mixed-effects logistic regression model: age, diagnostic group (TD vs. DLD), modifiability, and the number of phonemes in the target word. Older children who had TD and higher modifiability scores had better segmentation skills than other children. Words with fewer phonemes were also easier to segment than words with greater numbers of phonemes. The dynamic task had good sensitivity in the identification of DLD but less good specificity. Our findings indicate that a dynamic task of phonological awareness has the potential to be used as a diagnostic tool to differentiate TD and DLD.

This contribution presents tools for the assessment of phonological development of Polish-learning children and an initial qualitative evaluation thereof. The tools are consistent with those developed for 16 other languages in a cross-linguistic study of phonological development that is embedded in the framework of constraint-based nonlinear phonology. This theoretical foundation underlies the composition of a Polish word list for elicitation plus a supplementary analysis and intervention planning form (where intervention is warranted). A qualitative pilot study evaluated the tools in terms of adherence to underlying theoretical constructs, coverage of Polish phonology in the developmental context and utility for testing two children, one of whom was characterised by protracted phonological development. Further steps are required to develop the test into a norm-referenced instrument for clinical and research purposes, including quantitative evaluations of the tools' psychometric properties.

This study presents a model of automatic speech recognition (ASR) that is designed to diagnose pronunciation issues in children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) to replace manual transcriptions in clinical procedures. Because ASR models trained for general purposes mainly predict input speech into standard spelling words, well-known high-performance ASR models are not suitable for evaluating pronunciation in children with SSDs. We fine-tuned the wav2vec2.0 XLS-R model to recognise words as they are pronounced by children, rather than converting the speech into their standard spelling words. The model was fine-tuned with a speech dataset of 137 children with SSDs pronouncing 73 Korean words that are selected for actual clinical diagnosis. The model's Phoneme Error Rate (PER) was only 10% when its predictions of children's pronunciations were compared to human annotations of pronunciations as heard. In contrast, despite its robust performance on general tasks, the state-of-the-art ASR model Whisper showed limitations in recognising the speech of children with SSDs, with a PER of approximately 50%. While the model still requires improvement in terms of the recognition of unclear pronunciation, this study demonstrates that ASR models can streamline complex pronunciation error diagnostic procedures in clinical fields.

Children identified as deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) exhibit an increased risk of speech and language difficulties. Nonword repetition (NWR) is a potential tool for identifying language difficulties in children with limited experience with the target language. In this study, we explored associations between auditory, linguistic, demographic and cognitive factors and NWR performance in DHH children and their typically hearing (TH) peers. We also examined the effect of the group on NWR outcomes when different factors were statistically controlled for. Our study included 68 4- to 6-year-old children: 18 with bilateral hearing aids (BiHAs), 18 with bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) and 32 with TH. The participants completed the Finnish Nonword Repetition Test comprising 24 test items with varying syllable lengths. The assessment methods also included tests of phonological, lexical, language comprehension and sentence repetition skills, along with a measure of nonverbal intelligence. The results showed that none of the auditory, linguistic, demographic and cognitive factors examined in the present study were correlated with NWR performance in the BiHA group, while significant correlations between NWR skills and linguistic abilities were observed in the BiCI group. The DHH children showed extraordinary difficulties in NWR compared to their TH peers, and these group differences remained after controlling for linguistic and demographic variables. The NWR task may be a potential clinical tool for identifying DHH children at risk for poor language outcomes and in need of speech and language intervention.

Echolalia, a prevalent feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), has been extensively debated among behaviourists and developmental researchers for decades, long segmenting clinical work within the context of autism. This qualitative study aimed to explore the interactive underpinnings of immediate echolalia naturally occurring in dyadic conversation between autistic individuals and clinicians, employing turn-by-turn and sequence-by-sequence analysis within the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA). The results revealed that varying the complete-incomplete-transformed format, echolalia helped participants a) express their emotions, b) automatically associate conversation, c) organise their response, d) maintain conversational reciprocity, and e) assist with request initiation. Within the context of echolalia, the dynamics of conversation exhibited blocking, diverting, or affiliating patterns. The current study provides insights into the interactive traits of immediate echolalia and underscores the potential utility for clinical therapists to employ the echoic sources in clinical intervention.

Single-word phonological tests are widely used for detecting children at risk for Speech Sound Disorders (SSDs). However, specific conceptual and operational criteria should be evaluated to ensure that these assessments are valid and reliable and can serve as diagnostic tools. The current study aimed to investigate the validity and reliability of the screener of a phonological Greek instrument, named the Phonological Assessment for Greek (PAel) comparing the phonological performance of typically developing (TD) children and children with SSDs, aged 4 to 6 years. The participants were 20 TD children and 40 children with SSDs. All participants completed the screener of PAel, the 70-word list of the standardised Test of Phonetic and Phonological Development (TPPD), and a language test, namely the Action Picture Test. Participants who scored below the 25 percentile on the language test were excluded. Phonological analysis revealed that PAel has high content validity. The participants who had received a diagnosis of SSDs presented restricted consonant and cluster inventories and significantly lower whole-word match levels in comparison to their TD peers. The overall Spearman's correlation coefficients between PAel and TPPD were 0.611 for TD children ( < 0.001) and 0.875 for children with SSDs ( < 0.001), indicating good criterion validity. The tool demonstrated strong test-retest reliability and inter-rater reliability with Spearman values exceeding 0.85, and Intra-class correlation coefficients over 0.90. Overall, the results suggest that PAel has satisfactory reliability and validity and can be used as an assessment tool to detect children at risk for SSDs.

This study investigated language and executive functions (EF) in people with transcortical motor aphasia (TMA) and Broca's aphasia (BA). Participants included 19 patients with TMA, 19 patients with BA, and 25 healthy controls. Verbal Fluency tests, Stroop tests and Trail-Making tests were administered to all participants, and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) was administered to participants with aphasia. Results showed that (1) both groups of patients with aphasia had poorer performance on Verbal Fluency tests, Stroop tests and Trail-Making tests than healthy controls; (2) participants with BA had superior performance on Stroop tests and Trail-Making tests, but not on Verbal Fluency tests, than participants with TMA, and (2) the performance on Verbal Fluency tests, Stroop tests and Trail-Making was significantly correlated with the performance on BDAE for participants with TMA, but not for participants with BA. These results suggest that EF deficits are present in both patients with TMA and those with BA. They also show that the relationship between EF deficits and language impairments in people with aphasia might depend on the type of aphasia, aspects of language, and the components of EF measured.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with pragmatic language impairments in children, but less is known about the communicative abilities of adults with ADHD, especially when using a second or third language. In this study, we developed a questionnaire to collect self-report measures of a set of pragmatic skills in a person's first, second and third language, comparing adults with and without an ADHD diagnosis. One hundred seventy-nine multilingual adults with ( = 91) and without ADHD ( = 88) completed the survey. As predicted, adults with ADHD reported more pragmatic difficulties than the control group. More specifically, people with ADHD showed pronounced impairments in regulating their behaviour in spoken interactions in the form of excessive talking, frequently interrupting others, and speaking without thinking first. Notably, these types of hyperactive and impulsive behaviours were significantly reduced when people with ADHD communicated in a second or third language. For pragmatic difficulties related to inattention such as concentrating on a conversation, both groups tended to be more inattentive in their third language compared to their first and second language. The understanding of non-literal language was only affected by ADHD in the first language and was generally more taxing in a language with lower proficiency levels. Our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how ADHD affects different kinds of communicative abilities in multilingual adults. It also has implications for clinical practice, highlighting the importance of assessing symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in a person's dominant language.

This study investigated the vocal and early speech development of Korean-acquiring children with hearing loss (HL) who underwent early auditory amplification compared to their typical hearing (TH) counterparts. The research focused on phonological characteristics of child vocalisation based on samples collected from naturalistic home environments. One-day home recordings using a Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recorder were obtained from 6 children with HL and 12 children with TH who ranged from 17 to 23 months of age in Korean monolingual environments. Child volubility, canonical babbling ratio (CBR), consonant distributions, and utterance structures of vocalisations were evaluated through qualitative and quantitative analyses of vocalisation samples collected from LENA recordings. The findings revealed that children with HL displayed comparable vocalisation levels to children with TH, with no significant differences in volubility and CBR. In consonant and utterance shape inventories, noticeable quantitative and qualitative differences were observed between children with HL and those with TH. The study also suggested both universal and language-specific production patterns, revealing the early effects of ambient language on consonant distributions and utterance structures within their vocalisation repertoire. This study emphasised the role of auditory input and the importance of early auditory amplification to support speech development in children with HL.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to be characterised by phonetic and prosodic cues along with reduced vocabulary and syntax compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). However, there is considerable variation between mothers in the degree of lexical and syntactic reduction of their IDS. The present study aims to investigate the correspondences of the inter-individual variation of maternal IDS at 6 and 18 months with infants' language development at 18 months. 109 dyads of mothers and their firstborn infants participated in the study. Mothers' ID and AD storytelling based on standard picture stimuli were recorded at 6 and 18 months of their infants' age. We analysed measures of speech quantity (number of utterances and words), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance), and lexical diversity (type-token ratio). Language growth was measured bimonthly using the Hungarian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI W&G form. The results did not reveal any association between characteristics of mothers' ID narratives and their infants' concurrent language skills at 18 months. However, we found a longitudinal link between a distinct pattern of linguistic simplification in maternal ID storytelling at 6 months and the development of expressive vocabulary in infants at 18 months. Infants whose mother tends to reduce both lexical and syntactic complexity of ID narratives the most are more likely to exhibit higher language outcomes. Further research is warranted to explore the background factors and longer-term effects of this maternal strategy.