Mònica Sanz-Torrent

This study examines the contribution of a set of cognitive and linguistic variables as longitudinal predictors of reading (decoding and comprehension) and writing (spelling and text generation) in children with developmental language disorder two years later. A two-wave longitudinal study was conducted with 58 Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, including 31 with developmental language disorder and 27 with typical language development. At Time 1, participants were assessed in oral language and cognitive abilities. At Time 2, two years later, their reading and writing skills were evaluated. Children with typical development significantly outperformed those with developmental lanugage disorder in decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, and text generation. In the developmental language disorder group, phonological awareness and expressive vocabulary predicted decoding; while phonological awareness, concepts and the ability to follow directions, predicted reading comprehension. Additionally, nonword repetition and phonological awareness predicted spelling, whereas nonword repetition and word association predicted text generation. The findings highlight that oral language difficulties in children with developmental language disorder impact reading and writing development. Phonological awareness plays a crucial role in literacy beyond pre-school, emphasising the need for interventions that strengthen these skills.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties during audiovisual (AV) speech integration, which can impact their ability to understand and produce speech. We examined whether children with DLD differed in relying on auditory or visual cues compared to typically developing (TD) children during the recognition of words presented with incongruent sound and articulation. The selective attention to the eyes and mouth of a speaker was also tested. We hypothesised that the DLD group would be less aware of visual and auditory speech cues and would tend to look less at the mouth and eyes of the talker's face compared to their TD peers. We recorded children's eye movements with an eye tracker as they looked into the face of a speaking interlocutor. During the task, the speaker's face was articulating a word matched simultaneously with a different word heard. Afterwards, children were asked to choose the word perceived among four drawings. The DLD group showed less accuracy and was more affected by the competitor's words in comparison to the TD group. Moreover, their selective attention was allocated significantly less to the mouth and partially to the eyes of the talker's face in comparison to the control group. AV speech cues are important in speech perception and children with DLD face challenges in processing speech and phonological representations. Interventions that focus on enhancing AV integration through visually salient cues and perceptual learning strategies may be beneficial for improving speech perception outcomes in children with DLD.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by persistent deficits in communication and social interaction, and technology might benefit skill learning in this population. Despite communication deficits, many children with ASD can acquire two languages and may even prefer their second language. This study aimed to determine whether bilingual children with ASD would learn more new words in English than in Spanish, and whether computer-assisted instruction would outperform in-person instruction, compared with neurotypical children (NT). Twenty-eight bilingual (Spanish/English) children aged 6–12 participated: 14 with ASD and 14 neurotypical children (i.e., without autism), matched on age, sex, and language exposure. Each child learned 16 new words under four conditions (English technology, English person, Spanish technology, Spanish person), followed by recall and recognition tests. No significant differences emerged; children with ASD learned equally in both languages and under both conditions, matching neurotypical peers. However, certain factors (age, language exposure, device use) benefited children with ASD more than neurotypical peers.

This study investigates subject pronoun resolution in Catalan, a null-subject language, by examining linguistic and cognitive factors. We focus on gender, pronoun type (null and overt), and syntactic function (subject and object), as well as the order of mention (first and second) of antecedents. Using eye-tracking in the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), we analyze the interplay between these factors in both canonical (SVO) and non-canonical (OVS) sentence structures. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 (Study 1) explore how gender cues and pronoun type influence pronominal resolution in SVO sentences. Our findings reveal that gender facilitates early resolution but primarily affects first-mentioned antecedents. Null pronouns exhibit a strong preference for subject antecedents. However, overt pronouns, contrary to offline studies, show no strong preference for object antecedents and instead tend to favor first-mentioned subjects in ambiguous contexts. In unambiguous gender-marked cases, overt pronouns heavily rely on gender cues for reference resolution, but in ambiguous contexts, they display delayed resolution patterns. These results suggest that overt and null pronouns do not exhibit the expected division of labor proposed by the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (PAH). Instead, null pronouns robustly refer to subject antecedents, while overt pronouns show more variability. Experiments 4 and 5 (Study 2) extend this investigation to OVS sentences, revealing that linear order exerts a stronger influence on pronoun resolution than grammatical subjecthood. Specifically, first-mentioned antecedents, rather than syntactic subjects, guide resolution in OVS structures, particularly for overt pronouns. This challenges previous findings that overt pronouns prefer object antecedents and highlights positional prominence as a crucial factor in pronoun resolution in Catalan. Overall, our results contribute to a broader understanding of pronoun processing across null-subject languages and underscore the importance of positional prominence in pronominal interpretation and suggest that, in non-canonical structures, order-of-mention can override subjecthood in guiding resolution.

The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish- and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (M_age7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (M_age7.8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (M_age6.8 years), and 24 adults (M_age22.5 years). Empirical data revealed that children with DLD can comprehend verbal tense, at least in the present experimental conditions. Based on the empirical results and despite some minor differences between the DLD group and the chronological control group, we suggest that tense morphology comprehension in DLD might be more typical than what is generally considered. Additionally, we propose that verbal comprehension difficulties in children with DLD might be less related to the lack of understanding of specific morphological markers, and more to an accumulation of difficulty which leads to a linguistic processing slowdown.

Here, we studied the beginnings of language development, jointly assessing two groups of precursors, sociodemographic and pre-linguistic, that have previously been studied separately. Thus, the general objective of this study was to explore which factors best explained the acquisition of initial expressive vocabulary. The sample consisted of 504 participants from Catalan-speaking homes with ages ranging between 10 and 18 months. The data were obtained through the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCB-CDIs). Vocabulary development shows a lexical spurt at 17 months. Regression analyses show that pre-linguistic factors have more explanatory power of than sociodemographic ones. Within the sociodemographic variables, age, birth order and birth weight explain part of the vocabulary variance. With respect to pre-linguistic variables, imitation, late gestures and phrase comprehension are predictors of the initial vocabulary acquisition. Specifically, imitation and late gestures were the pre-linguistic behaviours that made it possible to distinguish between children with higher and lower levels of vocabulary. We discussed these findings in relation to their relevance for language acquisition and for the early assessment of linguistic competence.

Nonword repetition has been proposed as a diagnostic marker of developmental language disorder (DLD); however, the inconsistency in the ability of nonword repetition tasks (NRT) to identify children with DLD raises significant questions regarding its feasibility as a clinical tool. Research suggests that some of the inconsistency across NRT may be due to differences in the nature of the nonword stimuli. In this study, we compared children’s performance on NRT between two cohorts: the children in the Catalan–Spanish cohort (CS) were bilingual, and the children in the European Portuguese cohort (EP) were monolingual. NRT performance was assessed in both Spanish and Catalan for the bilingual children from Catalonia-Spain and in Portuguese for the monolingual children from Portugal. Results show that although the absolute performance differed across the two cohorts, with NRT performance being lower for the CS, in both Catalan and Spanish, as compared to the EP cohort in both, the cut-points for the likelihood ratios (LH) were similar across the three languages and mirror those previously reported in previous studies. However, the absolute LH ratio values for this study were higher than those reported in prior research due in part to differences in wordlikeness and frequency of the stimuli in the current study. Taken together, the findings from this study show that an NRT consisting of 3-, 4-, and 5-syllable nonwords, which varies in wordlikeness ratings, when presented in a random order accurately identifies and correctly differentiates children with DLD from TD controls the child is bilingual or monolingual.

Background: Function words, and more specifically prepositions and prepositional locutions, are considered to be one of the most important difficulties for children with DLD.Aims: To examine the capacity of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to comprehend different Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in a simple sentence structure, for example, El gato está sobre la mesa/El gato está bajo la mesa (The cat is on the table/The cat is under the table).Methods & Procedures: We used simple sentence structures to reduce lexical difficulties in order to focus our evaluation strictly on the grammatical morphemes under study. A total of 96 Spanish and Catalan‐speaking participants, divided into four groups, were evaluated in an eye‐tracking psycholinguistic experiment: 24 children with DLD (average age = 7.8 years, age range = 4.6–12.6), 24 children with the same chronological age (average age = 7.8 years, age range = 4.6–12.2), 24 children with the same linguistic level (average age = 6.8 years, age range = 4.6–9.4) and 24 adults (average age = 22.5 years, age range = 18–30).Outcomes & Results: The empirical data show that, despite some differences, bilingual children with and without DLD can comprehend Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions under the current experimental conditions.Conclusions & Implications: Our results suggest that the capacity of bilingual children with DLD to comprehend Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in real time and within simple sentence structures is preserved. What this paper adds: What is already known on the subject: The empirical literature indicates that children with DLD show important errors in the production of functional words in general, and prepositions in particular. However, unlike other grammatical morphemes (such as clitic pronouns and articles), prepositions have been less studied, and the few existing studies have focused on the dimension of language production, not comprehension. What this paper adds to existing knowledge: The present study, composed of two experimental tasks, seeks to determine to what extent the observable difficulty in the linguistic production of prepositions is also present in the comprehension of children with DLD. The empirical results suggest a less atypical comprehension in comparison with our initial hypothesis, and the differences that appear between the two tasks, allow us to formulate a theoretical interpretation regarding the mechanisms of their understanding. Thus far, we are not aware of other studies that have evaluated in real time the comprehension of prepositions and prepositional locutions in parallel. Clinical implications of this study: Results suggest the presence of a more preserved comprehension of prepositions and prepositional locutions, at least in real‐time experimental conditions (eye‐tracking) and in simple sentence structures. A less atypical comprehension raises the possibility of a better prognosis for children with DLD. Working with comprehension of simple sentences and the gradual addition of more difficult grammatical morphemes could help to enhance the comprehension of a growing complex grammar.

It has been demonstrated that children with specific language impairment (SLI) show difficulties not only with auditory but also with audiovisual speech perception. The goal of this study was to assess whether children with SLI might show reduced attention to the talker's mouth compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. An additional aim was to determine whether the pattern of attention to a talking face would be related to a specific subtype of SLI. We used an eye‐tracker methodology and presented a video of a talker speaking the children's native language. Results revealed that children with SLI paid significantly less attention to the mouth than the TD children. More specifically, it was also observed that children with a phonological‐syntactic deficit looked less to the mouth as compared to the children with a lexical‐syntactic deficit.

Word recognition includes the activation of a range of syntactic and semantic knowledge that is relevant to language interpretation and reference. Here we explored whether or not the number of arguments a verb takes impinges negatively on verb processing time. In this study, three experiments compared the dynamics of spoken word recognition for verbs with different preferred argument structure. Listeners’ eye movements were recorded as they searched an array of pictures in response to hearing a verb. Results were similar in all the experiments. The time to identify the referent increased as a function of the number of arguments, above and beyond any effects of label appropriateness (and other controlled variables, such as letter, phoneme and syllable length, phonological neighborhood, oral and written lexical frequencies, imageability and rated age of acquisition). The findings indicate that the number of arguments a verb takes, influences referent identification during spoken word recognition. Representational complexity and amount of information generated by the lexical item that aids target identification are discussed as possible sources of this finding.