Comparison of the types of child utterances mothers expand in children with language delays and with Down's syndrome

Translational research on early language development: Current challenges and future directions

There is a pressing need for the early and accurate identification of young children at risk for language and other developmental disabilities and the provision of timely, age-appropriate intervention, as mandated by Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Research has shown that early intervention is effective for many language impaired children in different etiological groups, and can reduce the functional impact of persistent disorders on children and their families. Yet, the accurate identification of infants and toddlers at risk for language impairment remains elusive, especially for late-talking children without obvious genetic or neurological conditions. In this paper, the need for translational research on basic processes in early language development in typical and atypical populations and the contextual factors that affect them are discussed, along with current challenges and future directions for its successful implementation. Implications of this research for clinical evidence-based practice are also considered.

Predictors of parent-child language during novel task play: a comparison between typically developing children and individuals with Down syndrome

Three questions were asked that explored the linguistic fine-tuning hypothesis and how parents might model language: (i) do parents significantly tune to their children's productive language or non-verbal cognition during play? (ii) is the level of the linguistic tuning different in the Down syndrome (DS) population compared to a typically developing (TD)-match group population? and (iii) do the two populations differ in requests for labels and the scaffolding responses to the requests? In an exploratory play condition, parents of children with DS used a mean length of utterance (MLU) significantly higher than the MLU used by the parents of younger TD children who were matched for MLU. Thus, the DS parents have a higher baseline MLU, but the non-significant correlations in the DS group do not support parental MLU tuning. There was evidence, however, for parental tuning to the children's lexicon using a number of different words when the DS children were at lower and average levels of receptive syntax and non-verbal cognition. In addition, DS and TD parents requested labels for novel toys with the same frequency, perhaps indicating that all groups of parents are still probing and building their children's lexicons. This is an important finding because it may help to explain why adolescents and young adults with DS have vocabulary comprehension skills greater than one would predict from measures of their production and non-verbal cognition.