Purpose:Provision of adequate support is much needed to secure equal educational opportunities for students with developmental language disorder (DLD). Important perspectives on support provision and its impact on academic progress are held by school professionals, caregivers, and students with DLD. This study sought to further the current knowledge on the perceived relation between educational support and academic progress for students with DLD by exploring key stakeholders' experiences.

Method:The study was centered around three students with DLD in the latter part of Swedish compulsory school (aged 12–16 years). The students, their caregivers, teachers, members of the support staff, and school-based speech-language pathologists were organized in three clusters, each centered around one student with DLD. Based on individual semistructured interviews, the stakeholders' perspectives were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.

Results:All stakeholders described educational support as crucial for the facilitation of the students' academic progress. Despite similarities in support provision, the perceived relation between the support provided and the students' academic progress varied in the three clusters. Our analysis is presented as three main themes, each constructed from stakeholder experiences in one cluster: (a) trade-off between student effort and achievement, (b) when support is not supportive, and (c) collaboration and targeted support have made great difference.

Conclusions:The results of this study emphasize the complexity of the relation between educational support and academic progress, showing that outcomes may differ considerably between educational contexts, despite similarities in support provision. The results suggest that the development of adequate support for students with DLD needs to include the perspectives of key stakeholders, particularly students themselves

This study explored the possible influence of phonotactic and orthotactic probability on fast mapping in school-age children with and without a developmental disorder. Participants were exposed to pictures of novel objects paired with spoken and written novel words, which varied in phonotactic and orthotactic probability. Fast mapping was examined with gaze behavior (proportion of looking time) and accuracy (picture identification, orthographic identification, picture naming). Participants were highly accurate during picture identification and orthographic identification, and less accurate during picture naming. Fast mapping was somewhat influenced by phonotactic and orthotactic probability. During picture identification, children were less likely to be accurate in trials with novel words with low orthotactic probability. Gaze behavior during exposure and response accuracy varied in terms of language ability and age.

Storytelling plays an important role in children’s overall development and wellbeing. Using stories to assess language allows for the simultaneous evaluation of both receptive and expressive language skills, which are essential for identifying developmental language delays and informing suitable educational or therapeutic support. Without age-appropriate narrative skill, children would struggle to achieve desired communication as well as academic goals. Cultural and language differences in narrative styles are also linked to children’s literacy. Since children learn from the immediate environment, maternal storytelling practices strongly influence children’s language and socioemotional development. We explore the narrative styles employed by Sri Lankan mothers when telling a known story to their preschool aged children. Twenty mother-child dyads were video-recorded when mothers told the story of the hare and the tortoise to preschool aged children, using a wordless picture sequence. Observational notes were taken focusing on the different strategies used by mothers to facilitate the child’s development through storytelling. All videos were transcribed verbatim and was reviewed multiple times. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to acknowledge the researcher’s influence on data interpretation. Three key themes emerged: inferring the shared familiarity of the story, engaging the children as co-narrators, and moral framing through storytelling. The findings reflect how mothers, as primary caregivers, use different narrative styles to effectively involve children, support their language and transfer moral values in storytelling. This could inform the design of culturally relevant narrative assessments and parent-training programmes to stimulate children’s language development.

Globally, there are more bilingual speakers than monolingual speakers; however, scant research evidence exists regarding social communication development and outcomes for bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A stronger evidence base will facilitate health professionals and educators providing accurate recommendations regarding language use. This study employed a longitudinal cohort design to compare social and communication skills, at baseline and over 12 months, for 60 monolingual and 60 bilingual children with ASD receiving community based early intervention. We found few differences at intake, and no difference in the magnitude of change over 12 months for this cohort. Findings support the notion that there is no basis on which to discourage home language use with bilingual children with ASD.

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness, the possessive construction, and noun phrase gender agreement, as well as word-order in nonsubject initiated sentences. For L2-learners, word order and the noun phrase gender agreement present main challenges. We discuss to what extent these morpho-syntactic weaknesses can be explained by different theoretical accounts and identify future research needs. Surface similarities between groups may originate from different factors and more knowledge is needed to inform educational and clinical practice for both of these groups of children.

Purpose A systematic review was performed to determine the extent to which orthographic facilitation, a strategy to improve word learning, has been demonstrated in the literature for children and adolescents from clinical categories such as developmental language disorders (DLD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Down syndrome, dyslexia, hearing impairment, intellectual disability, and cerebral palsy.

Method Five databases were searched for all studies published through December 2019. Eligible studies included participants from a clinical population (DLD, ASD, dyslexia, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, hearing impairment, etc.) and compared word learning with and without orthography. Selected studies were extracted for pertinent information. In addition, assessment of the methodological rigor was performed for each study.

Results The review yielded five studies that targeted word learning with orthographic facilitation for children from various clinical populations including DLD, verbal children with autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia. All studied populations showed a benefit for word learning in picture naming posttests when words were trained in the presence of orthography.

Conclusions For the studied populations, training words in the presence of orthography will improve word learning accuracy and retention. The review highlights the need for more research in this area across other clinical populations.

Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14632791.

Phonological awareness is a critical component of phonological processing that predicts childrens literacy outcomes. Phonological awareness skills enable children to think about the sound structure of words and facilitates decoding and the analysis of words during spelling. Past research has shown that childrens vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity are associated with their phonological awareness skills. Linguistic characteristics of words, such as phonological neighborhood density and orthography congruency have also been found to influence childrens performance in phonological awareness tasks. Literacy is a difficult area for deaf and hard of hearing children, who have poor phonological awareness skills. Although cochlear implantation (CI) has been found to improve these childrens speech and language outcomes, limited research has investigated phonological awareness in children with Cl. Rhyme awareness is the first level of phonological awareness to develop in children with normal hearing (NH). The current study investigates whether rhyme awareness in children with NH (n = 15, median age = 5; 5, IQR = 11 ms) and a small group of children with CI (n = 6, median age = 6; 11.5, IQR = 3.75 ms) is associated with individual differences in vocabulary and working memory. Using a rhyme oddity task, well-controlled for perceptual similarity, we also explored whether childrens performance was associated with linguistic characteristics of the task items (e.g., rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency). Results indicate that there is an association between vocabulary and working memory and performance in a rhyme awareness task in NH children. Only working memory was correlated with rhyme awareness performance in CI children. Linguistic characteristics of the task items, on the other hand, were not found to be associated with success. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed.

Grammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.