Late talkers

BACKGROUND: Studies on late talkers (LTs) highlighted their heterogeneity and the relevance of describing different communicative profiles. AIMS: To examine lexical skills and gesture use in expressive (E-LTs) vs. receptive-expressive (R/E-LTs) LTs through a structured task. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Forty-six 30-month-old screened LTs were distinguished into E-LTs (n= 35) and R/E-LTs (n= 11) according to their receptive skills. Lexical skills and gesture use were assessed with a Picture Naming Game by coding answer accuracy (correct, incorrect, no response), modality of expression (spoken, spoken-gestural, gestural), type of gestures (deictic, representational), and spoken-gestural answers' semantic relationship (complementary, equivalent, supplementary)...

Children are disadvantaged compared to adults when they perceive speech in a noisy environment. Noise reduces their ability to extract and understand auditory information. Auditory-Evoked Late Responses (ALRs) offer insight into how the auditory system can process information in noise. This study investigated how noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and stimulus type affect ALRs in children and adults. Fifteen participants from each group with normal hearing were studied under various conditions. The findings revealed that both groups experienced delayed latencies and reduced amplitudes in noise but that children had fewer identifiable waves than adults...

PURPOSE: Early intervention based on principles of cross-situational statistical learning (CSSL) for late-talking children has shown promise. This study explored whether parents could be trained to deliver this intervention protocol with fidelity and if they found the intervention to be acceptable. METHOD: Mothers of four English-speaking children aged 18-30 months who scored <10th centile for expressive vocabulary were recruited to an 8-week group training program...

INTRODUCTION: The population of children with slow emergence of language development varies widely, both in their initial profile and in their response to intervention. In this sense, there is a group of late talkers who continue to show persistent language difficulties, in some cases exhibiting signs compatible with verbal dyspraxia. METHOD: In this paper we present the different response to intervention of two profiles of late talkers. Specifically, the Target Word© program (Hanen Centre) was implemented, which is addressed to latetalking children and their families...

PURPOSE: Amplitude modulations (AMs) are important for speech intelligibility, and deficits in speech intelligibility are a leading source of impairment in childhood listening difficulties (LiD). The present study aimed to explore the relationships between AM perception and speech-in-noise (SiN) comprehension in children and to determine whether deficits in AM processing contribute to childhood LiD. Evoked responses were used to parse the neural origins of AM processing. METHOD: Forty-one children with LiD and 44 typically developing children, ages 8-16 years, participated in the study...

PURPOSE: Using eye-tracking, we assessed the receptive verb vocabularies of age-matched late talkers and typically developing children (experiment 1) and autistic preschoolers (experiment 2). We evaluated how many verbs participants knew and how quickly they processed the linguistic prompt. Our goal is to explore how these eye-gaze measures can be operationalized to capture verb knowledge in late talkers and autistic children. METHOD: Participants previewed two dynamic scenes side-by-side (e...

PURPOSE: Amplitude modulations (AM) are important for speech intelligibility, and deficits in speech intelligibility are a leading source of impairment in childhood listening difficulties (LiD). The present study aimed to explore the relationships between AM perception and speech-in-noise (SiN) comprehension in children and to determine whether deficits in AM processing contribute to childhood LiD. Evoked responses were used to parse the neural origin of AM processing with respect to sensory, perceptual, and cognitive stages of processing...

PURPOSE: Late talkers (LTs) are a group of children who exhibit delays in language development without a known cause. Although a hallmark of LTs is a reduced expressive vocabulary, little is known about LTs' processing of semantic relations among words in their emerging vocabularies. This study uses an eye-tracking task to compare 2-year-old LTs' and typical talkers' (TTs') sensitivity to semantic relationships among early acquired words. METHOD: U.S. monolingual English-speaking LTs ( n = 21) and TTs ( n = 24) completed a looking-while-listening task in which they viewed two images on a screen (e...

INTRODUCTION: Late talkers represent a heterogeneous population. We aimed to describe communication profiles of low-risk preterm and full-term late talkers according to their receptive and expressive vocabulary size, considering communicative, linguistic, cognitive, and motor skills, as well as biological and environmental risk factors. METHODS: Sixty-eight late talkers (33 born low-risk preterm and 35 full-term) were identified through a language screening at 30 months...

PURPOSE: Late talking children are at risk of ongoing language impairment. This intervention study replicated and extended research based on cross-situational statistical learning principles. METHOD: Three late talking children (age 24-32 months) were enrolled into the concurrent multiple baseline single-case experimental intervention study. The intervention consisted of 16 sessions over eight/nine weeks, including 10-11 pairs of target and control words (three per session)...

Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions, and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated previously; however, the extent to which age affects the timing and fidelity of encoding of target and interfering speech streams are not well understood. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated how continuous speech is represented in auditory cortex in the presence of interfering speech, in younger and older adults...

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PURPOSE: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. METHOD: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social-emotional development, were identified as typical talkers ( n = 67, M age = 27.0 months, SD = 1.4; Study 1) or late talkers ( n = 30, M age = 27.0 months, SD = 2.0; Study 2). Children completed an eye-tracking task assessing their ability to recognize both nouns and verbs, to use verbs to predict an upcoming noun's referent, and to use verbs to infer the meaning of novel nouns...

Late talkers are a heterogeneous group of children who experience delayed language development in the absence of other known causes. Late talkers show delays in expressive phonological development, but less is known about their receptive phonological development. In the current study, U.S. monolingual English-speaking typical talkers (TTs) (n = 23, mean age = 26.27 months, 57% male; 78.3% White) and late talkers (n = 22, mean age = 24.57 months, 59% male, 72...

BACKGROUND: Preschool language skills and language delay predict academic and socioemotional outcomes. Children from deprived environments are at a higher risk of language delay, and both minority ethnic and bilingual children can experience a gap in language skills at school entry. However, research that examines late talking (preschool language delay) in an ethnically diverse, bilingual, deprived environment at age 2 is scarce. METHODS: Data from Born in Bradford's Better Start birth cohort were used to identify rates of late talking (≤10th percentile on the Oxford-Communicative Development Inventory: Short) in 2-year-old children within an ethnically diverse, predominantly bilingual, deprived UK region (N=712)...

Purpose Using eye-tracking, we assessed the receptive verb vocabularies of late talkers and typically developing children (Experiment 1) and autistic preschoolers (Experiment 2). We evaluated how many verbs participants knew and how quickly they processed the linguistic prompt. Method Participants previewed two dynamic scenes side-by-side (e.g., "stretching" and "clapping") and were then prompted to find the target verb. Children's eye gaze behaviors were operationalized using established approaches in the field with modifications in consideration for the type of stimuli (dynamic scenes versus static images) and the populations included...

INTRODUCTION: Dialogic reading is one of the most used and studied techniques within the frame of shared book reading activities between children and adults. The current review aims to analyze its effects in late talkers and children with developmental language disorder, that is, not associated to other condition. METHODS: A systematic review of the literature was carried out following PRISMA Statement guidelines. RESULTS: The investigations reviewed show advances in children's lexical, grammatical and pragmatic indicators of language functioning...

Children acquire language naturally, but there is variation in language acquisition patterns. Indeed, different internal and external variables play a role in acquiring language. However, there are open research questions about the contribution of different variables to language development. Moreover, with societal changes and due to the pandemic situation, there has been a growing interest in testing digitalization related to indirect language acquisition assessment. In this study, a web-based assessment survey was developed to (1) describe the relation between expressive vocabulary, Socio-Conversational Skills (SCS), gender, parental education, executive functions (EFs), and pretend play; (2) determine whether the survey can detect differences between late talkers (LTs) and children with typical language development; (3) identify children with "overall high" and "overall low" communicative-language scores to test the validity of expressive vocabulary as a main indicator to detect LTs...

PURPOSE: This feasibility study examined a caregiver-implemented telehealth model of the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) protocol. We asked whether caregivers could reach fidelity on VAULT, if the protocol was socially and ecologically valid, and if late-talking toddlers could learn new words with this model. METHOD: Five late-talking monolingual and bilingual toddlers and four caregivers participated. The caregiver-related research questions involved measurements taken at multiple time points and replication across subjects but did not follow a specific research design...

Night sleep and parental bedtime practices have rarely been investigated in late talkers. This study aimed to explore: night sleep, parental bedtime practices, and their associations in late talkers as well as individual, socio-demographic, and socio-relational factors affecting them. Parents of 47 30-month-old late talkers, born low-risk preterm ( n = 24) or full-term ( n = 23), with an expressive vocabulary size ≤10th percentile measured by the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Words and Sentences, and normal cognitive abilities measured by the Bayley Scales, completed the Infant Sleep Questionnaire, the Parental Interactive Bedtime Behaviour Scale, and the Parenting Stress Index Short Form...