Filling in the Blank: The Development of a Writing Screener for Elementary School Students Who Speak African American English.

PURPOSE: Clinicians are tasked with using culturally and linguistically appropriate tools to evaluate oral and written language development accurately. However, limited tools account for linguistic diversity in writing. This gap can lead to under- and overdiagnosis of students who speak nonmainstream dialects. This study addressed that gap by developing a writing task to identify nonmainstream dialect features in the writing of early elementary school students. We describe the development, feasibility, and results of pilot testing of the task. METHOD: One hundred fifty-one first and second graders participated in the study as part of a larger study of nonmainstream dialect use. Students completed standardized literacy and language assessments and the researcher-developed writing task. The writing task used a novel fill-in-the-blank format to identify morphological features that vary between Mainstream American English and nonmainstream varieties such as African American English. RESULTS: Second-grade students performed better on the writing task than first graders, and writing performance was strongly related to standardized literacy scores. Literacy skills were the strongest predictor of Mainstream American English use in writing, but spoken dialect use also correlated with written dialect use. CONCLUSIONS: The writing task captured dialect use in early elementary school students' writing, and students' performance on standardized literacy measures predicted written dialect features. These results are a first step toward developing a standardized measure to help professionals appropriately diagnose written expression disorders within linguistically diverse students. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25079891.

The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants.

Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age and hearing age. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home environment (appx. 16 hours/child; >730 hours of observation) to measure adult speech input, child vocal productivity, and caregiver-child interaction. Results showed that children with cochlear implants and typical hearing were exposed to and engaged in similar amounts of spoken language with caregivers. However, the home environment did not reflect developmental stages as closely for children with implants, or predict their speech outcomes as strongly. Home-based speech-language interventions should focus on the unique input-outcome relationships for this group of children with hearing loss.

I remembered the chorm! Word learning abilities of children with and without phonological impairment.

BACKGROUND: Children with phonological impairment present with pattern-based errors in their speech production. While some children have difficulties with speech perception and/or the establishment of robust underlying phonological representations, the nature of phonological impairment in children is still not well understood. Given that phonological and lexical development are closely linked, one way to better understand the nature of the problem in phonological impairment is to examine word learning abilities in children. AIMS: To examine word learning and its relationship with speech perception, speech production and vocabulary knowledge in children aged 4-5 years. There were two variables of interest: speech production abilities ranging from phonological impairment to typical speech; and vocabulary abilities ranging from typical to above average ('lexically precocious'). METHODS & PROCEDURES: Participants were 49 Australian-English-speaking children aged 48-69 months. Children were each taught four novel non-words (out of a selection of eight) through stories, and word learning was assessed at 1 week post-initial exposure. Word learning was assessed using two measures: confrontation naming and story retell naming. Data were analysed by group using independent-samples t-tests and Mann-Whitney U-tests, and continuously using multiple linear regression. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: There was no significant difference in word learning ability of children with and without phonological impairment, but regardless of speech group, children with above average vocabulary had significantly better word learning abilities than children with average vocabulary. In multiple linear regression, vocabulary was the only significant predictor of variance in word learning ability. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Children with phonological impairment can be lexically precocious and learn new words like their peers without phonological impairment. Contrary to expectations, vocabulary knowledge rather than expressive phonological ability explained variance in measures of word learning. These findings question an assumption that children with phonological impairment have underspecified phonological representations. They also highlight the heterogeneity among children with phonological impairment and the need to better understand the nature of their difficulty learning the phonological system of the ambient language. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject There is limited research examining the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment. Most previous research focuses on word properties such as phonotactic probability and neighbourhood density. Within the existing literature there are different reports and conclusions regarding the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment and whether their word learning differs from that of children with typically developing speech. What this study adds to existing knowledge This study found that vocabulary was the strongest predictor of word learning across children with and without phonological impairment. There was no significant difference in word learning ability between children with and without phonological impairment. However, children with lexically precocious vocabulary abilities were significantly better at word learning than children with average vocabulary abilities. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Findings from this study support the importance of assessing and considering measures of word learning-including vocabulary-when working with children with phonological impairment. This study indicates that it is possible to use stories coupled with measures of confrontation naming and story retell to gain deeper insight into children's word learning abilities.

When Children's Production Deviates From Observed Input: Modeling the Variable Production of the English Past Tense.

As children gradually master grammatical rules, they often go through a period of producing form-meaning associations that were not observed in the input. For example, 2- to 3-year-old English-learning children use the bare form of verbs in settings that require obligatory past tense meaning while already starting to produce the grammatical -ed inflection. While many studies have focused on overgeneralization errors, fewer studies have attempted to explain the root of this earlier stage of rule acquisition. In this work, we use computational modeling to replicate children's production behavior prior to the generalization of past tense production in English. We illustrate how seemingly erroneous productions emerge in a model, without being licensed in the grammar and despite the model aiming at conforming to grammatical forms. Our results show that bare form productions stem from a tension between two factors: (1) trying to produce a less frequent meaning (the past tense) and (2) being unable to restrict the production of frequent forms (the bare form) as learning progresses. Like children, our model goes through a stage of bare form production and then converges on adult-like production of the regular past tense, showing that these different stages can be accounted for through a single learning mechanism.

Preschoolers rely on rich speech representations to process variable speech.

To learn language, children must map variable input to categories such as phones and words. How do children process variation and distinguish between variable pronunciations ("shoup" for soup) versus new words? The unique sensory experience of children with cochlear implants, who learn speech through their device's degraded signal, lends new insight into this question. In a mispronunciation sensitivity eyetracking task, children with implants (N = 33), and typical hearing (N = 24; 36-66 months; 36F, 19M; all non-Hispanic white), with larger vocabularies processed known words faster. But children with implants were less sensitive to mispronunciations than typical hearing controls. Thus, children of all hearing experiences use lexical knowledge to process familiar words but require detailed speech representations to process variable speech in real time.

The Relationship Between Speech Perception, Speech Production, and Vocabulary Abilities in Children: Insights From By-Group and Continuous Analyses.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. METHOD: Sixty-one Australian English-speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this study. Children's speech production abilities ranged along the continuum from SSDs through to typical speech. Their vocabulary abilities ranged along the continuum from typical to above average ("lexically precocious"). Children completed routine speech and language assessments in addition to an experimental Australian English lexical and phonetic judgment task. RESULTS: When analyzing data by group, there was no significant difference between the speech perception ability of children with SSDs and that of children without SSDs. Children with above-average vocabularies had significantly better speech perception ability than children with average vocabularies. When analyzing data continuously, speech production and vocabulary were both significant positive predictors of variance in speech perception ability, both individually in simple linear regression and when combined in multiple linear regression. There was also a significant positive correlation between perception and production of two of the four target phonemes tested (i.e., /k/ and /ʃ/) among children in the SSD group. CONCLUSIONS: Results from this study provide further insight into the complex relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children. While there is a clinical and important need for categorical distinctions between SSDs and typically developing speech, findings further highlight the value of investigating speech production and vocabulary abilities continuously and categorically. By capturing the heterogeneity among children's speech production and vocabulary abilities, we can advance our understanding of SSDs in children. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22229674.

The competition-compensation account of developmental language disorder.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection in novel contexts leads the inflection to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved through a compensatory behavior that involves producing a more accessible alternative: in English, the bare form. We formalize this hypothesis within a probabilistic model that trades off context-dependent versus independent processing. Results show an over-reliance on preceding stem contexts when retrieving the inflection in a model that has difficulty with processing novel inflected forms. We further show that following the introduction of a bias to store and retrieve forms with preceding contexts, generalization in the typically developing (TD) models remains more or less stable, while the same bias in the DLD models exaggerates difficulties with generalization. Together, the results suggest that inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes by children with DLD could stem from inferences they make on the basis of data containing fewer novel inflected forms. Our account extends these findings to suggest that problems with detecting a form in novel contexts combined with a bias to rely on familiar contexts when retrieving a form could explain sequential planning difficulties in children with DLD. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Generalization difficulties with inflectional morphemes in children with Developmental Language Disorder arise from these children's limited experience with novel inflected forms. Limited experience with a form in novel contexts could lead to a storage bias where retrieving a form often requires relying on familiar preceding stems. While generalization in typically developing models remains stable across a range of model parameters, certain parameter values in the impaired models exaggerate difficulties with generalization. Children with DLD compensate for these retrieval difficulties through accessibility-driven language production: they produce the most accessible form among the alternatives.

The development of spoken word recognition in informative and uninformative sentence contexts.

Although there is ample evidence documenting the development of spoken word recognition from infancy to adolescence, it is still unclear how development of word-level processing interacts with higher-level sentence processing, such as the use of lexical-semantic cues, to facilitate word recognition. We investigated how the ability to use an informative verb (e.g., draws) to predict an upcoming word (picture) and suppress competition from similar-sounding words (pickle) develops throughout the school-age years. Eye movements of children from two age groups (5-6 years and 9-10 years) were recorded while the children heard a sentence with an informative or neutral verb (The brother draws/gets the small picture) in which the final word matched one of a set of four pictures, one of which was a cohort competitor (pickle). Both groups demonstrated use of the informative verb to more quickly access the target word and suppress cohort competition. Although the age groups showed similar ability to use semantic context to facilitate processing, the older children demonstrated faster lexical access and more robust cohort suppression in both informative and uninformative contexts. This suggests that development of word-level processing facilitates access of top-down linguistic cues that support more efficient spoken language processing. Whereas developmental differences in the use of semantic context to facilitate lexical access were not explained by vocabulary knowledge, differences in the ability to suppress cohort competition were explained by vocabulary. This suggests a potential role for vocabulary knowledge in the resolution of lexical competition and perhaps the influence of lexical competition dynamics on vocabulary development.

Predictive language processing in young autistic children.

Recent theories propose that domain-general deficits in prediction (i.e., the ability to anticipate upcoming information) underlie the behavioral characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). If these theories are correct, autistic children might be expected to demonstrate difficulties on linguistic tasks that rely on predictive processing. Previous research has largely focused on older autistic children and adolescents with average language and cognition. The present study used an eye-gaze task to evaluate predictive language processing among 3- to 4-year-old autistic children (n = 34) and 1.5- to 3-year-old, language-matched neurotypical (NT) children (n = 34). Children viewed images (e.g., a cake and a ball) and heard sentences with informative verbs (e.g., Eat the cake) or neutral verbs (e.g., Find the cake). Analyses of children's looking behaviors indicated that young autistic children, like their language-matched NT peers, engaged in predictive language processing. Regression results revealed a significant effect of diagnostic group, when statistically controlling for age differences. The NT group displayed larger difference scores between the informative and neutral verb conditions (in looks to target nouns) compared to the ASD group. Receptive language measures were predictive of looking behavior across time for both groups, such that children with stronger language skills were more efficient in making use of informative verbs to process upcoming information. Taken together, these results suggest that young autistic children can engage in predictive processing though further research is warranted to explore the developmental trajectory relative to NT development. LAY SUMMARY: This study found that 3- to 4-year-old autistic children and younger, language-matched neurotypical (NT) children both used verbs to predict upcoming nouns in sentences like "Eat the cake." For both autistic and NT children, those with stronger language skills were able to predict upcoming nouns more quickly.

Effects of Device Limitations on Acquisition of the /t/-/k/ Contrast in Children With Cochlear Implants.

OBJECTIVES: The present study investigated how development of the /t/-/k/ contrast is affected by the unique perceptual constraints imposed on young children using cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that children with CIs would demonstrate unique patterns of speech acquisition due to device limitations, rather than straightforward delays due to a lack of auditory input in the first year of life before implantation. This study focused on the contrast between /t/ and /k/ because it is acquired early in the sequence of development, requires less advanced motor control than later-acquired place contrasts, is differentiated by spectral cues (which are particularly degraded when processed by CIs), and is not easily differentiated by visual cues alone. Furthermore, perceptual confusability between /t/ and /k/ may be exacerbated in front-vowel contexts, where the spectral energy for /k/ is shifted to higher frequencies, creating more spectral overlap with /t/. DESIGN: Children with CIs (n = 26; ages 31 to 66 mo) who received implants around their first birthdays were matched to peers with normal hearing (NH). Children participated in a picture-prompted auditory word-repetition task that included over 30 tokens of word-initial /t/ and /k/ consonants. Tokens were balanced across front-vowel and back-vowel contexts to assess the effects of coarticulation. Productions were transcribed and coded for accuracy as well as the types of errors produced (manner of articulation, voicing, or place of articulation errors). Centroid frequency was also calculated for /t/ and /k/ tokens that were produced correctly. Mixed-effects models were used to compare accuracy, types of errors, and centroid frequencies across groups, target consonants, and vowel contexts. RESULTS: Children with CIs produced /t/ and /k/ less accurately than their peers in both front- and back-vowel contexts. Children with CIs produced /t/ and /k/ with equal accuracy, and /k/ was produced less accurately in front-vowel contexts than in back-vowel contexts. When they produced errors, children with CIs were more likely to produce manner errors and less likely to produce voicing errors than children with NH. Centroid frequencies for /t/ and /k/ were similar across groups, except for /k/ in front-vowel contexts: children with NH produced /k/ in front-vowel contexts with higher centroid frequency than children with CIs, and they produced /k/ and /t/ with equal centroid frequencies in front-vowel contexts. CONCLUSIONS: Children with CIs not only produced /t/ and /k/ less accurately than peers with NH, they also demonstrated idiosyncratic patterns of acquisition, likely resulting from receiving degraded and distorted spectral information critical for differentiating /t/ and /k/. Speech-language pathologists should consider perceptual confusability of consonants (and their allophonic variations) during their assessment and treatment of this unique population of children.

Use of Mutual Exclusivity and its Relationship to Language Ability in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

To efficiently learn new words, children use constraints such as mutual exclusivity (ME) to narrow the search for potential referents. The current study investigated the use of ME in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) peers matched on nonverbal cognition. Thirty-two toddlers with ASD and 26 NT toddlers participated in a looking-while-listening task. Images of novel and familiar objects were presented along with a novel or familiar label. Overall, toddlers with ASD showed less efficient looking toward a novel referent when a novel label was presented compared to NT toddlers, controlling for age and familiar word knowledge. However, toddlers with ASD and higher language ability demonstrated more robust use of ME than those with lower language ability.

Acoustic-Lexical Characteristics of Child-Directed Speech Between 7 and 24 Months and Their Impact on Toddlers' Phonological Processing.

Speech-language input from adult caregivers is a strong predictor of children's developmental outcomes. But the properties of this child-directed speech are not static over the first months or years of a child's life. This study assesses a large cohort of children and caregivers (n = 84) at 7, 10, 18, and 24 months to document (1) how a battery of phonetic, phonological, and lexical characteristics of child-directed speech changes in the first 2 years of life and (2) how input at these different stages predicts toddlers' phonological processing and vocabulary size at 2 years. Results show that most measures of child-directed speech do change as children age, and certain characteristics, like hyperarticulation, actually peak at 24 months. For language outcomes, children's phonological processing benefited from exposure to longer (in phonemes) words, more diverse word types, and enhanced coarticulation in their input. It is proposed that longer words in the input may stimulate children's phonological working memory development, while heightened coarticulation simultaneously introduces important sublexical cues and exposes them to challenging, naturalistic speech, leading to overall stronger phonological processing outcomes.

Auditory feedback experience in the development of phonetic production: Evidence from preschoolers with cochlear implants and their normal-hearing peers.

Previous work has found that preschoolers with greater phonological awareness and larger lexicons, who speak more throughout the day, exhibit less intra-syllabic coarticulation in controlled speech production tasks. These findings suggest that both linguistic experience and speech-motor control are important predictors of spoken phonetic development. Still, it remains unclear how preschoolers' speech practice when they talk drives the development of coarticulation because children who talk more are likely to have both increased fine motor control and increased auditory feedback experience. Here, the potential effect of auditory feedback is studied by examining a population-children with cochlear implants (CIs)-which is naturally differing in auditory experience. The results show that (1) developmentally appropriate coarticulation improves with an increased hearing age but not chronological age; (2) children with CIs pattern coarticulatorily closer to their younger, hearing age-matched peers than chronological age-matched peers; and (3) the effects of speech practice on coarticulation, measured using naturalistic, at-home recordings of the children's speech production, only appear in the children with CIs after several years of hearing experience. Together, these results indicate a strong role of auditory feedback experience on coarticulation and suggest that parent-child communicative exchanges could stimulate children's own vocal output, which drives speech development.

Practice and experience predict coarticulation in child speech.

Much research in child speech development suggests that young children coarticulate more than adults. There are multiple, not mutually-exclusive, explanations for this pattern. For example, children may coarticulate more because they are limited by immature motor control. Or they may coarticulate more if they initially represent phonological segments in larger, more holistic units such as syllables or feet. We tested the importance of several different explanations for coarticulation in child speech by evaluating how four-year-olds' language experience, speech practice, and speech planning predicted their coarticulation between adjacent segments in real words and paired nonwords. Children with larger vocabularies coarticulated less, especially in real words, though there were no reliable coarticulatory differences between real words and nonwords after controlling for word duration. Children who vocalized more throughout a daylong audio recording also coarticulated less. Quantity of child vocalizations was more predictive of the degree of children's coarticulation than a measure of receptive language experience, adult word count. Overall, these results suggest strong roles for children's phonological representations and speech practice, as well as their immature fine motor control, for coarticulatory development.

Coarticulation facilitates lexical processing for toddlers with autism.

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are delayed in learning language. The mechanisms underlying these delays are not well understood but may involve differences in how children process language. In the current experiment, we compared how 3- to 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 58) and 2- to 3-year-old children who are typically developing (TD, n = 44) use phonological information to incrementally process speech. Children saw pictures of objects displayed on a screen and heard sentences labeling one of the objects (e.g., Find the ball). For some sentences, the determiner the contained coarticulatory information about the onset of the target word. For other sentences, the determiner the did not contain any coarticulatory information. Children were faster to fixate the target object for sentences with vs. without coarticulation. This effect of coarticulation was the same for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. When controlling for group differences in receptive language ability, the effect of coarticulation was stronger for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. These results suggest that phonological processing is an area of relative strength for children with ASD.

Does Early Phonetic Differentiation Predict Later Phonetic Development? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study of /ɹ/ Development in Preschool Children.

Purpose We evaluated whether children whose inaccurate /ɹ/ productions showed evidence phonetic differentiation with /w/ at 3.5-4.5 years of age improved in /ɹ/ production over the next year more than children whose inaccurate productions did not show evidence of such differentiation. We also examined whether speech perception, inhibitory control, and vocabulary size predicted growth in /ɹ/. Method A set of typically developing, monolingual English-speaking preschool children (n = 136) produced tokens of /ɹ/- and /w/-initial words at two time points (TPs), at which they were 39-52 and 51-65 months old. Children's productions of /ɹ/ and /w/ were narrowly phonetically transcribed. Children's productions at the earlier time point were rated by naïve listeners using a visual analog scale measure of phoneme goodness; these ratings were used to assess the degree of phonetic differentiation between /ɹ/ and /w/. Results Accuracy for both phonemes varied considerably at both TPs. The growth in accuracy of /ɹ/ between the two TPs was not predicted by any individual-differences measures, nor by the degree of differentiation between /ɹ/ and /w/at the earlier time point. Conclusion Low vocabulary size, low inhibitory control, poor speech perception, and the absence of early phonetic differentiation are not necessarily limiting factors in predicting /ɹ/ growth in individual children in the age range we studied.

Gradient activation of speech categories facilitates listeners' recovery from lexical garden paths, but not perception of speech-in-noise.

Listeners activate speech-sound categories in a gradient way, and this information is maintained and affects activation of items at higher levels of processing (McMurray et al., 2002; Toscano et al., 2010). Recent findings by Kapnoula et al. (2017) suggest that the degree to which listeners maintain within-category information varies across individuals. Here we assessed the consequences of this gradiency for speech perception. To test this, we collected a measure of gradiency for different listeners using the visual analogue scaling (VAS) task used by Kapnoula et al. (2017). We also collected 2 independent measures of performance in speech perception: a visual world paradigm (VWP) task measuring participants' ability to recover from lexical garden paths (McMurray et al., 2009) and a speech-perception task measuring participants' perception of isolated words in noise. Our results show that categorization gradiency does not predict participants' performance in the speech-in-noise task. However, higher gradiency predicted higher likelihood of recovery from temporarily misleading information presented in the VWP task. These results suggest that gradient activation of speech sound categories is helpful when listeners need to reconsider their initial interpretation of the input, making them more efficient in recovering from errors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Children With Cochlear Implants Use Semantic Prediction to Facilitate Spoken Word Recognition.

Purpose Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use language knowledge via semantic prediction to facilitate recognition of upcoming words and help compensate for uncertainties in the acoustic signal. Method Five- to 10-year-old children with CIs heard sentences with an informative verb (draws) or a neutral verb (gets) preceding a target word (picture). The target referent was presented on a screen, along with a phonologically similar competitor (pickle). Children's eye gaze was recorded to quantify efficiency of access of the target word and suppression of phonological competition. Performance was compared to both an age-matched group and vocabulary-matched group of children with NH. Results Children with CIs, like their peers with NH, demonstrated use of informative verbs to look more quickly to the target word and look less to the phonological competitor. However, children with CIs demonstrated less efficient use of semantic cues relative to their peers with NH, even when matched for vocabulary ability. Conclusions Children with CIs use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition but do so to a lesser extent than children with NH. Children with CIs experience challenges in predictive spoken language processing above and beyond limitations from delayed vocabulary development. Children with CIs with better vocabulary ability demonstrate more efficient use of lexical-semantic cues. Clinical interventions focusing on building knowledge of words and their associations may support efficiency of spoken language processing for children with CIs. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14417627.

African American English and Early Literacy: A Comparison of Approaches to Quantifying Nonmainstream Dialect Use.

Purpose Many studies have found a correlation between overall usage rates of nonmainstream forms and reading scores, but less is known about which dialect differences are most predictive. Here, we consider different methods of characterizing African American English use from existing assessments and examine which methods best predict literacy achievement. Method Kindergarten and first-grade students who speak African American English received two assessments of dialect use and two assessments of decoding at the beginning and end of the school year. Item-level analyses of the dialect-use assessments were used to compute measures of dialect usage: (a) an overall feature rate measure based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test, (b) a subscore analysis of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test based on items that pattern together, (c) an alternative assessment where children repeat and translate sentences, and (d) "repertoire" measures based on a categorical distinction of whether a child used a particular feature of mainstream American English. Results Models using feature rate measures provided better data-model fit than those with repertoire measures, and baseline performance on a sentence repetition task was a positive predictor of reading score at the end of the school year. For phonological subscores, change from the beginning to end of the school year predicted reading at the end of the school year, whereas baseline scores were most predictive for grammatical subscores. Conclusions The addition of a sentence imitation task is useful for understanding a child's dialect and anticipating potential areas for support in early literacy. We observed some support for the idea that morphological dialect differences (i.e., irregular verb morphology) have a particularly close tie to later literacy, but future work will be necessary to confirm this finding. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13425968.

Competing Perceptual Salience in a Visual Word Recognition Task Differentially Affects Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Differences in visual attention have long been recognized as a central characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Regardless of social content, children with ASD show a strong preference for perceptual salience-how interesting (i.e., striking) certain stimuli are, based on their visual properties (e.g., color, geometric patterning). However, we do not know the extent to which attentional allocation preferences for perceptual salience persist when they compete with top-down, linguistic information. This study examined the impact of competing perceptual salience on visual word recognition in 17 children with ASD (mean age 31 months) and 17 children with typical development (mean age 20 months) matched on receptive language skills. A word recognition task presented two images on a screen, one of which was named (e.g., Find the bowl!). On Neutral trials, both images had high salience (i.e., were colorful and had geometric patterning). On Competing trials, the distracter image had high salience but the target image had low salience, creating competition between bottom-up (i.e., salience-driven) and top-down (i.e., language-driven) processes. Though both groups of children showed word recognition in an absolute sense, competing perceptual salience significantly decreased attention to the target only in the children with ASD. These findings indicate that perceptual properties of objects can disrupt attention to relevant information in children with ASD, which has implications for supporting their language development. Findings also demonstrate that perceptual salience affects attentional allocation preferences in children with ASD, even in the absence of social stimuli. LAY SUMMARY: This study found that visually striking objects distract young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from looking at relevant (but less striking) objects named by an adult. Language-matched, younger children with typical development were not significantly affected by this visual distraction. Though visual distraction could have cascading negative effects on language development in children with ASD, learning opportunities that build on children's focus of attention are likely to support positive outcomes.