Reading skill profiles of dysfluent readers in grades 2 and 3.

Text reading fluency (TRF) is a common reading intervention target in second and third grade. TRF requires the integration of several skills that result in several pathways to dysfluent reading. However, when applying the drill-down approach to intervention targeting, practitioners are guided to consider students' rate and accuracy when reading connected text after ruling out decoding difficulties. A question remains whether students' reading rate and accuracy alone is sensitive to differences in the underlying skills that promote TRF. We used latent profile analysis to investigate whether different profiles of component reading skills could be identified among second- (n = 127) and third-grade (n = 170) students who were referred for an intervention targeting TRF. Most students were identified as white (56%) and students were predominately English speakers (87%). At the beginning of the intervention, we measured participants' skills in listening comprehension, reading comprehension, reading vocabulary, word reading efficiency, and decoding efficiency. Four profiles emerged in both grades with similar patterns in terms of the component skills influencing TRF. Students in two of the profiles demonstrated relative strengths in word reading or reading comprehension with their other skills near the sample average. A third profile approximated the sample average across all component skills whereas the fourth profile was below the sample average in all measured skills. However, some of the empirically derived profiles did not differ in terms of students' average reading rate. For example, the average words read correct per minute did not significantly differ between students with relative strengths in comprehension and students with relative strengths with word reading. Our results suggest that differences in students' text reading rate and accuracy may not always capture potentially relevant differences in the skills that influence TRF.

Cognitive correlates of math abilities in autism spectrum disorder.

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the contribution of different cognitive processes to specific math abilities in students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) students. The study involved a group of students with ASD without intellectual disabilities (n = 26) and a group with TD students (n = 52). The two groups aged from six to 20 years old and were matched for age, sex ratio and visuospatial reasoning. To assess math abilities, four math tasks were administered: arithmetic facts, mental calculation, mathematical inferences and math problem solving. Concerning cognitive processes, participants were tested on vocabulary, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, response inhibition and interference control. The group with ASD showed lower scores on all specific math measures than the TD group; cognitive processes differently contributed to diverse math abilities, and vocabulary and verbal working memory were stronger associated to specific math abilities in the group with ASD than in the TD group. The current results suggest that students with ASD had lower math abilities that are generalized to different math tasks. Implications for research and clinical assessment and intervention were discussed.

Dogs with a vocabulary of object labels retain them for at least 2 years.

Long-term memory of words has a crucial role in the developing abilities of young children to acquire language. In dogs, the ability to learn object labels is present in only a small group of uniquely gifted word learner (GWL) dogs. As they are very rare, little is known about the mechanisms through which they acquire such large vocabularies. In the current study, we tested the ability of five GWL dogs to retrieve 12 labelled objects 2 years after the object-label mapping acquisition. The dogs proved to remember the labels of between three and nine objects. The results shed light on the process by which GWL dogs acquire an exceptionally large vocabulary of object names. As memory plays a crucial role in language development, these dogs provide a unique opportunity to study label retention in a non-linguistic species.

QuickPic AAC: An AI-Based Application to Enable Just-in-Time Generation of Topic-Specific Displays for Persons Who Are Minimally Speaking.

As artificial intelligence (AI) makes significant headway in various arenas, the field of speech-language pathology is at the precipice of experiencing a transformative shift towards automation. This study introduces QuickPic AAC, an AI-driven application designed to generate topic-specific displays from photographs in a "just-in-time" manner. Using QuickPic AAC, this study aimed to (a) determine which of two AI algorithms (NLG-AAC and GPT-3.5) results in greater specificity of vocabulary (i.e., percentage of vocabulary kept/deleted by clinician relative to vocabulary generated by QuickPic AAC; percentage of vocabulary modified); and to (b) evaluate perceived usability of QuickPic AAC among practicing speech-language pathologists. Results revealed that the GPT-3.5 algorithm consistently resulted in greater specificity of vocabulary and that speech-language pathologists expressed high user satisfaction for the QuickPic AAC application. These results support continued study of the implementation of QuickPic AAC in clinical practice and demonstrate the possibility of utilizing topic-specific displays as just-in-time supports.

Early, typical, and late talkers: an exploratory study on predictors of language development in the first two years of life.

Background: The consensus in scientific literature is that each child undergoes a unique linguistic development path, albeit with shared developmental stages. Some children excel or lag behind their peers in language skills. Consequently, a key challenge in language acquisition research is pinpointing factors influencing individual differences in language development. Methods: We observed children longitudinally from 3 to 24 months of life to explore early predictors of vocabulary size. Based on the productive vocabulary size of children at 24 months, 30 children met our sample selection criteria: 10 late talkers and 10 early talkers, and we compared them with 10 typical talkers. We evaluated interactive behaviors at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months, considering vocal production, gaze at mother's face, and gestural production during mother-child interactions, and we considered mothers' report of children's actions and gestures and receptive-vocabulary size at 15 and 18 months. Results: Results indicated early precursors of language outcome at 24 months identifiable as early as 3 months in vocal productions, 6 months for gaze at mother's face and 12 months for gestural productions. Conclusions: Our research highlights both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, identifying the early indicators of belonging to the group of late or early talkers underscores the significant role of this developmental period for future studies. On a practical note, our findings emphasize the crucial need for early investigations to identify predictors of vocabulary development before the typical age at which lexical delay is identified.

[Early vocabulary development in Mandarin children with cochlear implantation].

Objective: To investigate the development of receptive and expressive vocabulary in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CI) during the first year after CI activation. Methods: A total of 827 children (411 boys and 416 girls) who were implanted CI before 2.5 years of age from October 2019 to December 2022 in the Department of Auditory Implantation, Shandong Provincial ENT Hospital were included in this study. The Infant Checklist of the Mandarin Early Vocabulary Inventory (EVI) was used to assess the quantity and content of receptive and expressive vocabulary at the time of CI activation and at the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th months post-activation. SPSS 22.0 was used to describe the receptive and expressive vocabulary of CI children at the first year after activation. Results: During the first year after CI activation, CI children's receptive and expressive vocabulary consistently increased with the CI usage. The average number of receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary respectively increased from 0 to 178, and from 0 to 97. At the first year of post-activation, the number of receptive and expressive vocabulary of CI children were superior to that of hearing-age matched typical-hearing children, but fell behind of that of chronological age matched typical-hearing children. In terms of lexical categories, receptive and expressive vocabulary was acquired in the following order: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. Among the top 50 words that CI children could express, nouns were the most common, then followed by verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. Father's education level can significantly and positively predictethe receptive vocabulary of CI children at the first year post-activation. At the first year after CI activation, the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles were 113, 149, 178, 202, 223 for the receptive vocabulary, and 9, 37, 97, 148, 188 for expressive vocabulary. Conclusion: For Mandarin speaking children with CI, the receptive and expression vocabulary continuely increased within the first year after CI activation. The ability to grasp receptive vocabulary precedes the ability to express expressive vocabulary. Compared to hearing-age matched typical-hearing children, CI children showed faster rate of the vocabulary growth, and earlier and more frequently verb expression. However, it still larged behind that of chronological age matched hearing normal children. CI children respectively understood and expressed nouns and verbs the first. In children with CI, the first concepts understood and expressed were nouns and verbs. Among the first 50 words expressed, nouns were the most numerous, and the age at which verbs were acquired was earlier than that for hearing-age matched typical-hearing children.

Reading books: The positive impact of print exposure on written word recognition.

Regular print exposure is thought to benefit reading and language processes: those who read more have a larger vocabulary and better spelling and comprehension skills. Yet, there is little or no direct evidence that exposure to print facilitates reading. Here, we used an ecologically valid design to test the impact of print exposure on the early stages of reading in skilled adult readers. Participants read a novel at their own pace. Reading was followed by a lexical decision task, in which the positive trials were words that were exposed in the novel, and matched controls not exposed in the novel. If exposure during reading had a positive impact on subsequent word recognition, exposed words would be processed more efficiently than not-exposed words (exposure effect). This effect was obtained in three experiments. In addition, the effect was not modulated by the amount of exposure (1 vs. 3 occurrences in the text; Experiment 1), or the timing between reading and the exposure test (immediately after reading vs. on the following day; Experiment 3). However, the effect was present only in low-frequency words (Experiment 3). Interpretations of the exposure effect in terms of activation threshold and lexical quality are discussed.

The Effect of Age of First Exposure on Vocabulary, Mean Length of Utterance, Morphosyntactic Accuracy, and Semantic and Sentence-Level Patterns in the First 2 Years of French Second-Language Learning by Preschool- to Adolescent-Age Mandarin Speakers.

BACKGROUND: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). METHOD: Participants were 18 immigrants ranging in age from 2;11 to 14;2 (years;months), all within their first year in Montreal at Time 1, enrolled in a French school or day care, and from a Mandarin first language background. Participants were tested again a year later. Measures included receptive and expressive French vocabulary tests and conversational language samples analyzed using traditional measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) and morphological accuracy as well as novel measures of semantic and sentence-level patterns. RESULTS: Performance was relatively high already at Time 1 and increased significantly at Time 2 in both vocabulary and MLU. At Time 2, vocabulary scores were below normative values, whereas MLU was within expected values relative to monolingual and simultaneous bilinguals for the majority of the participants. However, higher MLUs were accompanied by more instances of both semantic errors and creative semantic strategies. French performance was strongly related to AoE; with amount of exposure equivalent, older participants outperformed the younger ones on MLU and vocabulary. Semantic errors and creative uses were strongly predicted by AoE; however, morphological accuracy and number of agrammatical utterances were not. CONCLUSIONS: This initial period of French learning involved a rapid growth spurt for most of the participants. We argue that the pattern observed, particularly among the older children, constitutes an early stage of L2 learning characterized by long utterances that are also frequently hard to understand as speakers encounter challenges and use creative strategies in their attempt to convey meaning. Comparison with normative reference bases for monolinguals and bilinguals with greater cumulative L2 exposure who have similar MLUs should be done with much caution during this early period.

Disentangling the roles of age and knowledge in early language acquisition: A fine-grained analysis of the vocabularies of infant and child language learners.

The words that children learn change over time in predictable ways. The first words that infants acquire are generally ones that are both frequent and highly imageable. Older infants also learn words that are more abstract and some that are less common. It is unclear whether this pattern is attributable to maturational factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficiently developed cognitive faculties needed to learn abstract words) or linguistic factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficient knowledge of their language to use grammatical or contextual cues needed to figure out the meaning of more abstract words). The present study explores this question by comparing vocabulary acquisition in 53 preschool-aged children (M = 51 months, range = 30-76 months) who were adopted from China and Eastern Europe after two and half years of age and 53 vocabulary-matched infant controls born and raised in English speaking families in North America (M = 24 months, range = 16-33 months). Vocabulary was assessed using the MB-CDI Words and Sentences form, word frequency was estimated from the CHILDES database, and imageability was measured using adult ratings of how easily words could be pictured mentally. Both groups were more likely to know words that were both highly frequent and imageable (resulting in an over-additive interaction). Knowledge of a word was also independently affected by the syntactic category that it belongs to. Adopted preschoolers' vocabulary was slightly less affected by imageability. These findings were replicated in a comparison with a larger sample of vocabulary-matched controls drawn from the MB-CDI norming study (M = 22 months, range = 16-30 months; 33 girls). These results suggest that the patterns of acquisition in children's early vocabulary are primarily driven by the accrual of linguistic knowledge, but that vocabulary may also be affected by differences in early life experiences or conceptual knowledge.

Shared characteristics of intervention techniques for oral vocabulary and speech comprehensibility in preschool children with co-occurring features of developmental language disorder and speech sound disorder: a systematic review with narrative synthesis.

OBJECTIVES: To descriptively compare and contrast intervention techniques for preschool children with features of developmental language disorder (outcome: oral vocabulary) and speech sound disorder (outcome: speech comprehensibility) and analyse them in relation to effectiveness and theory. DESIGN: This is a systematic review with narrative synthesis. The process was supported by an expert steering group consisting of relevant professionals and people with lived experience. DATA SOURCES: Ovid Emcare, MEDLINE Complete, CINAHL, APA PsycINFO, ERIC, and Communication Source from January 2012 were searched. Relevant studies were obtained from an initial published review (up to January 2012). ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Interventions for preschool children (80% aged 2:0-5:11 years) with idiopathic speech or language needs; outcomes relating to either oral vocabulary or speech comprehensibility. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Searches were conducted on 27 January 2023. Two independent researchers screened at abstract and full-text levels. Data regarding intervention content (eg, techniques) and format/delivery (eg, dosage, location) were extracted. Data were synthesised narratively according to the methods of Campbell et al. RESULTS: 24 studies were included: 18 for oral vocabulary and 6 for speech comprehensibility. There were 11 randomised controlled trials, 2 cohort studies and 11 case series. Similarities included a focus on input-related techniques and similar therapy activities. Speech studies were more likely to be professional-led and clinic-led, rather than at home and through a parent. Analysis was restricted by heterogeneity in study design and terminology, as well as gaps within intervention reporting. Information deemed important to the expert steering group was missing. CONCLUSIONS: Similarities and differences between intervention techniques for oral vocabulary and speech comprehensibility have been identified and synthesised. However, analysis of effectiveness was limited due to issues with study design and heterogeneity within studies. This has implications for the progression of the evidence base within the field. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42022373931.

Differences in the type of vocabulary understood by deaf and hearing students: Results to guide interventions.

INTRODUCTION: Vocabulary knowledge is an essential element in language development. There is evidence of significant differences in vocabulary knowledge between deaf children and hearing peers of the same age. These differences put deaf students at a disadvantage when compared to their hearing counterparts. The aim of this study was to investigate whether certain types of words characterise the lexical difficulties of deaf students. Our starting point is that this knowledge is needed to design interventions that are adapted to the particular needs of these students for their lexical development. METHODS: We evaluated the lexical comprehension of 90 Spanish students. The sample comprised 45 hearing students and 45 students with severe or profound hearing loss. Both groups were attending the later years of primary school (8 to -12-year-olds). They were tested using the Spanish Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III. The performance of both groups was statistically compared using percentiles and standard scores as well as a selected set of words from the test. RESULTS: No significant differences between hearing and deaf groups were found by age, sex, and sociocultural level. Significant differences were found between groups in their percentile and standard scores. There were no significant differences in performance between the two groups on only five of the 25 words with the highest error rate in the deaf group. The qualitative analysis of the remaining 20 words that were especially challenging for deaf students reveals results of interest which could help guide interventions. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate the need for lexical intervention for deaf students in the final years of primary school. The specialised support service for deaf learners should approach the intervention by targeting a specific type of vocabulary, making the semantic relationships between these words more transparent and promoting a deeper understanding of them.

Narrative reconstruction in deaf and hearing children: A comparative study in the context of Arabic diglossia.

This study explores the narrative skills of deaf and hearing children within the context of Arabic diglossia, a linguistic environment characterised by significant differences between spoken dialects and formal written language. Using Stein and Glenn's (1979) and Bruner's (1991) frameworks, the research analyses the narrative constructions of 13 hearing and 13 deaf children in Kuwait. The findings reveal that hearing children, benefiting from consistent exposure to spoken and formal Arabic, produced more coherent and detailed narratives compared to deaf children. Hearing participants also demonstrated greater vocabulary diversity. Age-related improvements in narrative skills were more pronounced among hearing children, while the impact of sign language exposure on narrative abilities was significant among deaf children. The study underscores the critical role of early language exposure and educational support in fostering narrative development, particularly in a diglossic context. These findings highlight the need for specialised educational strategies to support the unique narrative development needs of deaf children.

Socioeconomic Deprivation Detrimentally Influences Language Outcomes in Toddlers With Cleft Palate.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of socioeconomic deprivation on language and developmental outcomes in toddlers with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP ± L). Other factors known to influence language outcomes were also considered, including home language history, history of hearing problems, syndromic diagnoses, and sex. METHOD: A multicenter, cross-sectional study design was conducted. Data for 566 16-month-old toddlers with CP ± L were collected from 17 outpatient cleft palate clinics located throughout the United States. Outcome measures included the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, LENA Developmental Snapshot, age at first word as reported by the caregiver, and the Ages and Stages Questionnaires-Third Edition (ASQ-3). Multivariable linear or logistic regression was used to determine the influence of socioeconomic deprivation, as measured by the Area Deprivation Index, on language and developmental outcomes. RESULTS: Greater socioeconomic deprivation significantly predicted poorer language outcomes in toddlers with CP ± L, including receptive vocabulary words (p = .02), expressive vocabulary words (p = .02), and late-developing gestures (p = .02). Additionally, toddlers from less affluent neighborhoods produced their first words significantly later than their counterparts living in more affluent areas (p < .01). Lower maternal education levels predicted significantly increased risk for problem solving delays (p < .01), and patients with subsidized insurance were at significantly increased risk for personal-social delays on the ASQ-3 (p < .01). CONCLUSIONS: Children with CP ± L are susceptible to developmental delays associated with socioeconomic deprivation. These findings have implications for identifying a child's individual risk factors for developmental language disorders when conducting speech-language assessments. Future study should examine how inequities in care can be mitigated and addressed.

Developing language in a digital world.

Young children's screen time is increasing, raising concerns about its negative impact on language development, particularly vocabulary. However, digital media is used in a variety of ways, which likely differentially impact language development. Instead of asking 'how much' screen time, the focus should be on how digital media is used.

Multisyllabic decoding achievement and relation to vocabulary at the end of elementary school.

Multisyllabic decoding poses a significant challenge to upper elementary grade readers. The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the reliability and validity of a classroom assessment, the Multisyllabic Decoding Inventory (MDI); (b) describe fourth- and fifth-grade students' decoding of multisyllabic words in relation to their semantic difficulty (age of acquisition ratings); (c) investigate which aspects of word knowledge (word recognition and decoding skill, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological knowledge) predict real word and nonword reading for multisyllabic words; and (d) determine how student word knowledge and semantic difficulty of words jointly affect the odds of accurately recognizing a multisyllabic word. We found that (a) the MDI demonstrated acceptable internal consistency reliability and concurrent validity with standardized measures of word recognition and oral reading fluency; (b) students demonstrated strong performance in reading multisyllabic words and nonwords, but words with higher age of acquisition were less frequently recognized; (c) multisyllabic word reading was predicted by word recognition and decoding skill, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological knowledge, whereas multisyllabic nonword reading was predicted by decoding skills and morphological knowledge only; and (d) grade level, word recognition and decoding skill, and vocabulary at the student level increased the odds of recognizing a multisyllabic word correctly, whereas a word's age of acquisition rating decreased the odds of recognizing a multisyllabic word correctly. The results suggest that students in the upper elementary grades may benefit from multisyllabic decoding instruction that integrates decoding and vocabulary strategies.

Modeling item-level variance of polysyllabic word reading in developing readers: Exploring semantically related child, word, and child-by-word predictors.

Across word reading development, there are important and evolving relationships between oral and written semantic knowledge. Recent research has focused on these relationships, with accumulating evidence supporting the role of word knowledge and related word characteristics as important factors influencing polysyllabic word reading abilities. The purpose of this study was to investigate how semantic-related effects across child-level skills (e.g., general vocabulary knowledge), word-level properties (e.g., age of acquisition), child-by-word-level familiarity (e.g., item-level familiarity), and interactions between key child attributes and word characteristics (e.g., word reading skill by age of acquisition) contribute to polysyllabic word reading. Specifically, we emphasize the semantic contributions of word-level features to word reading development, which have been relatively underexplored in the literature. A sample of elementary school students oversampled for word reading difficulty (N = 92) in Grades 3 to 5 read a set of polysyllabic words (J = 45) and completed a battery of reading and language-related measures. Using cross-classified random-effects models and accounting for various control variables, semantic-related variables representing item-level familiarity; child-level set for variability; and word-level age of acquisition and number of morphemes were significant predictors in the main-effects model. A significant interaction between sight word efficiency and age of acquisition indicated higher probabilities of correctly reading polysyllabic words at lower levels of acquisition for better readers. Results indicate important semantic-related influences on polysyllabic word reading at the child, word, and child-by-word levels, suggesting meaningful relationships between knowledge of the orthographic form of a word and semantic knowledge in developing readers.

Word learning is hands-on: Insights from studying natural behavior.

Infants' interactions with social partners are richly multimodal. Dyads respond to and coordinate their visual attention, gestures, vocalizations, speech, manual actions, and manipulations of objects. Although infants are typically described as active learners, previous experimental research has often focused on how infants learn from stimuli that is well-crafted by researchers. Recent research studying naturalistic, free-flowing interactions has explored the meaningful patterns in dyadic behavior that relate to language learning. Infants' manual engagement and exploration of objects supports their visual attention, creates salient and diverse views of objects, and elicits labeling utterances from parents. In this chapter, we discuss how the cascade of behaviors created by infant multimodal attention plays a fundamental role in shaping their learning environment, supporting real-time word learning and predicting later vocabulary size. We draw from recent at-home and cross-cultural research to test the validity of our mechanistic pathway and discuss why hands matter so much for learning. Our goal is to convey the critical need for developmental scientists to study natural behavior and move beyond our "tried-and-true" paradigms, like screen-based tasks. By studying natural behavior, the role of infants' hands in early language learning was revealed-though it was a behavior that was often uncoded, undiscussed, or not even allowed in decades of previous research. When we study infants in their natural environment, they can show us how they learn about and explore their world. Word learning is hands-on.

Testing theories of the vocabulary spurt with monolingual and bilingual infants.

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive changes. To test these theories, English-French monolingual and bilingual children with different exposure to each language were studied. Dense, longitudinal data were analyzed from 45 infants aged 16-30 months, whose expressive vocabulary was measured on a total of 617 occasions in English and/or French. Single-language (English and/or French), concept (number of concepts lexicalized across both languages), and word (sum of both languages) vocabulary scores were computed. Infants' exposure to each language and their exposure balance were measured using a language exposure questionnaire. Logistic curves were fitted to each infant's data to estimate the timing (midpoint) and steepness (slope) of the vocabulary spurt in single-language, concept, and word vocabularies. Seventy-six percent of infants showed a spurt in at least one vocabulary type, and bilinguals were less likely to show one in their nondominant than their dominant language. For single-language vocabulary, infants with more exposure to a language had earlier spurts. For combined vocabularies (concept and word), monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals had earlier and steeper spurts than balanced bilinguals. Results better support the predictions of accumulator models than cognitive theories and show that infants follow different vocabulary acquisition trajectories based on their language background. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Morphological and Inhibitory Skills in Monolingual and Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder.

PURPOSE: This study examined the language and nonverbal inhibitory control skills of Italian monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) preschoolers with Italian as their second language and of age-matched monolingual and bilingual peers with developmental language disorder (DLD). METHOD: Four groups of preschoolers were enrolled: 30 TD Italian monolinguals, 24 TD bilinguals, 19 Italian monolinguals with DLD, and 19 bilinguals with DLD. All children were assessed in Italian on vocabulary, receptive morphosyntax, and morphological markers for DLD in the Italian language (i.e., third-person verb inflections, definite articles, third-person direct-object clitic pronouns, simple prepositions) and nonverbal inhibitory control skills. Group performance was compared using a series of one-way analyses of variance. RESULTS: Monolingual and bilingual children with DLD achieved significantly lower performance in all language measures compared to both TD monolingual and bilingual children. However, TD bilinguals, although comprehensively showing better language skills than monolinguals with DLD, achieved a performance closer to that of monolinguals with DLD but significantly higher than that of bilinguals with DLD. Both TD monolinguals and bilinguals showed better results than both DLD groups in inhibitory control tasks, particularly in the interference suppression task. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a picture of language and inhibitory control characteristics of children with various language profiles and adds to the literature on potential markers of DLD among bilingual children. These results suggest that the assessment of nonlinguistic markers, which are associated with language impairment, could be a useful approach to better specify the diagnosis of DLD and reduce cases of misdiagnosis in the context of bilingualism.

Transcutaneous cervical vagus nerve stimulation enhances second-language vocabulary acquisition while simultaneously mitigating fatigue and promoting focus.

Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) is a promising technique for enhancing cognitive performance and skill acquisition. Yet, its efficacy for enhancing learning rate and long-term retention in an ecologically valid learning environment has not been demonstrated. We conducted two double-blind sham-controlled experiments examining the efficacy of auricular tVNS (taVNS: Experiment (1) and cervical tVNS (tcVNS: Experiment (2), on a 5 day second-language vocabulary acquisition protocol among highly selected career linguists at the US Department of Defense's premier language school. tcVNS produced accelerated recall performance during training (Day 2-4), benefits of which were maintained across a 24 h retention interval with no stimulation at the final test. Consistent with prior work, tcVNS also produced fatigue-mitigating and focus-promoting effects as measured by the Air Force Research Laboratory Mood Questionnaire. Based on the current and the previous findings supporting tVNS' efficacy on performance, training enhancement, and fatigue mitigation, we believe tcVNS to be an effective learning acceleration tool that can be utilized at language-teaching and other institutions focused on intensive training of cognitive skills.