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Acquiring language and communication skills is one of the biggest challenges for children with Down syndrome (DS). However, few evidence-based interventions exist to enhance the development of language and communication in this population. Shared book reading (SBR) is well-established as an effective intervention for language and communication development of typically developing children, and evidence of the possible effectiveness of this approach for those at risk of language difficulties is emerging. This paper provides a mini-review of the existing evidence for SBR in relation to language and communication outcomes for young children with DS. A systematic literature search was conducted with the following inclusion criteria: children with DS aged 0–6;11 years, SBR, language or communication outcomes. The results show that interventions which incorporate SBR strategies are associated with improved language and communication outcomes for young children with DS, improved parental sensitivity, and continuing implementation of SBR strategies following intervention instruction. However, evidence is limited in scope, of low quality, including mostly single case studies, with only one study having a control group. We conclude that although SBR may hold promise as a possible intervention, further research is essential to establish what specific components of SBR intervention are most effective for young children with DS and what further adaptations are needed to accommodate the cognitive profile and variability within this population.

To provide a comprehensive picture of the perceptions, experiences and strategies underpinning effective collaborative working between speech and language therapists and parents of children, (aged ≤ 5;11) with speech sound disorder (SSD), particularly focusing on how parents are supported to develop their role as implementers of intervention.

Children with Developmental language disorders (DLD) experience difficulties in learning new words (Kan and Winsor 2010). It has been suggested that, for these children, the challenge is in encoding the newly encountered words, while their ability to consolidate and retain them is comparable to their Typically Developing peers (TD) (Bishop & Hsu 2015; Jackson et al 2021). A previous meta-analysis on the topic (Kan and Winsor 2010) included 28 studies which tested only the encoding phase. In the past 10 years a growing body of research explored word learning in children with DLD beyond encoding, suggesting the need of an updated meta-analysis synthesizing the overall evidence for the encoding deficit hypothesis. Finally, the acquisition of new words is a complex process that relies on previously stored linguistic knowledge and, at the same time, requires processing abilities including working memory. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear which of these domains is affected by DLD preventing children from learning new words. This work quantitatively combines previous findings on word learning in children with DLD to: - Identify which stage of word learning is impaired in this clinical population; - Explore whether the difficulties are predicted by children’s lexical knowledge and/or Working memory capacity; - Examine the contribution of task characteristics (number of words, exposure, word length) 831 papers were retrieved via PsycINFO, MEDLINE/PubMed, Web of Science, the Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts. Only studies with group comparison (DLD vs TD) design with an age matched control group were included. Forty studies met the inclusion criteria claiming 122 effect sizes.

Research with English-speaking populations has shown that there is a relationship between developmental language disorder (DLD) and emergent literacy skills in children. A small number of Arabic studies have indirectly investigated this relationship in typically developing (TD) children, and children with reading difficulties, and demonstrated the important role of morphosyntactic skills in Arabic reading acquisition. However, none of the previous work has examined the relationship between oral language and emergent literacy skills in children with and without DLD. The aims of this study are twofold: to investigate the language and emergent literacy skills of Saudi Arabic children with DLD aged between 4;0– 6;11 years of age; to compare their performance to age and socioeconomic status matched TD children, and to investigate the relationship between language and emergent literacy skills in both groups. A comprehensive Arabic language and emergent literacy battery was administered. Findings demonstrated that the TD group significantly outperformed the DLD group on most emergent literacy tasks. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than the TD group on syllable segmentation, and phoneme awareness skills. There were significant associations between oral language skills and emergent literacy skills in the DLD group. In the TD group, vocabulary knowledge and syntactic skills were associated with some emergent literacy skills. Syntactic skills were found to have moderately significant relationship with all emergent literacy skills in both groups. This might suggest the important role of morphosyntactic skills to literacy development in Arabic. Overall, findings were consistent with existing literature, and demonstrated strong relationships between oral language and emergent literacy skills in the Arabic language.

Purpose: This study evaluates the effectiveness of a nonword repetition (NWR) task in discriminating between Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and age-matched typically-developing (TD) children. \ud Methods: Participants were 30 children with DLD aged between 4;00 and 6;10 and 60 TD children aged between 4;00 and 6;8 matched on chronological age. The Arabic version of a Quasi-Universal Nonword Repetition task was administered. The task comprises 30 nonwords that vary in length, presence of consonant clusters (CC) and wordlikeness ratings. Responses were scored using an item-level scoring method. To assess the diagnostic accuracy of the task. \ud ROC curve analysis was conducted to determine the best cut-off point with the highest sensitivity and specificity values and likelihood ratios were calculated.\ud Results: Children with DLD scored significantly lower on the NWR task than their age� matched TD peers. Only the DLD group was influenced by the phonological complexity of the \ud nonwords, with nonwords with two CC being more difficult than nonwords with no or only one CC. For both groups, three-syllable nonwords were repeated less accurately than two and one-syllable nonwords. Also, high word-like nonwords were repeated more accurately than nonwords with low wordlikeness ratings. The best cutoff score had sensitivity and specificity of 93% and highly informative likelihood ratios.\ud Conclusion: NWR was an area of difficulty for Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD. NWR showed excellent discriminatory power in differentiating Arabic-speaking \ud children diagnosed with DLD from their age-matched TD peers. NWR appears to hold promise for clinical use as it is a useful indicator of DLD in Arabic. These results need to be further validated using population-based studies.

Purpose\ud This study investigated the production of tense and subject-verb agreement in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in comparison to their typically developing peers (TD) in terms of (1) performance accuracy and (2) error patterns. \ud Method\ud Participants were 14 children with DLD aged 4;0 - 7;10 (years; months) and 32 TD children aged 3;0-8;0 (years; months) matched on non-verbal abilities. Children were asked to complete a picture-based verb elicitation task. The task was designed to measure the production accuracy of tense and subject-verb agreement inflections in Arabic. \ud Results \ud The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on the verb elicitation task. The DLD group was significantly less accurate than the TD group in marking tense, specifically present tense. They were also less accurate in marking agreement in general, with specific difficulty in using feminine verb forms. The DLD and TD groups differed in their tense error patterns, but not in agreement error patterns.\ud Conclusion \ud The acquisition of verb morphology in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD appears to be delayed and possibly different from their TD peers. The DLD group found the production of marked verb forms more challenging than less marked ones. These results are discussed in light of the structural characteristics of Arabic. Future studies would need to include larger sample sizes, investigate other aspects of verb morphology, including both production and comprehension, include other language domains, and consider longitudinal designs to provide more in-depth knowledge of Arabic language acquisition.

Purpose\ud The study explored longitudinally the course of vocabulary and general language development in a group of infants with Down syndrome (DS) compared to a group of typically-developing (TD) infants matched on non-verbal mental ability (NVMA). \ud Method\ud We compared the vocabulary and general language trajectories of the two groups in two ways: a) at three time points during a 12 month period, and b) at 2 time points when the groups had made equal progress in non-verbal mental ability (a period of 6 months for the TD infants, versus 12 months for the infants with DS). \ud Results \ud The TD group had overtaken the DS group on all general language and vocabulary measures by the end of the 12-month period. However, expressive communication and expressive vocabulary were developing at the same rate and level in the two groups when examined over a period in which the two groups were matched in gains in non-verbal mental ability. Furthermore, the infants with DS showed a receptive language advantage over the TD group; this group’s auditory comprehension and receptive vocabulary scores were superior to those of the TD group at both time points when non-verbal mental ability was accounted for. \ud Conclusion\ud The results shed light on the widely reported discrepancy between expressive and receptive language in individuals with DS. Although infants with DS appear to be developing language skills more slowly than chronological age TD peers, when NVMA is taken into account, infants with DS do not have expressive language delays and they seem to show a receptive language advantage.

There is little research on stress and prominence in Bahasa Melayu (BM). Work which has been done on varieties of Malay concluded that pitch or durational differences do not contribute to the production or\ud perception of stress. This study aimed to investigate the role of intensity in the perception of stress in BM among two groups of listeners, 16 native speakers of BM and 30 of BrE, in comparison with spoken British English (BrE) and Malay Speaker English (MSE). Listeners rated 30 low-pass filtered sentences, ten from each language, indicating all syllables they perceived as stressed. Comparisons of listener identification of stress with syllable intensity yielded no statistically significant difference in the BrE and\ud MSE conditions. In the BM condition, BrE listeners rated significantly more syllables as stressed with low to mid intensity than the BM listeners. The results are discussed in terms of the contribution of intensity to perceived prominence in languages.

One of the most used tests of nonword repetition is the Children’s test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep, Gathercole et al., 1994, Gathercole & Baddeley, 1996). The test is composed of nonwords of different length, and normative data suggest that children experience more difficulties in repeating long nonwords. An analysis of the distribution of phonological clusters in the test shows that non-initial clusters are unequally distributed in the test, and they always appear in long nonwords. For this reason, we hypothesised that the difficulties children encounter with long nonwords may be influenced by the phonological complexity of the clusters, and not just by the challenge for working memory associated with long nonwords. To test the hypothesis, we compared performance in long nonwords with and without a non-initial cluster in 18 children with language impairment and 18 typically developing children. Without questioning the validity of the test as a diagnostic tool, our analysis shows that, in line with our prediction, long nonwords with non-initial clusters are repeated less accurately by both groups. In addition, there was an interaction of the effect of cluster and age: specifically, it is absent in younger children and it gradually increases with age. These findings suggest that phonological complexity may be impacting on the length effect normally observed in the CNRep task, and this impact may be particularly evident in older children.

The detailed linguistic assessment of children with Williams syndrome (WS) in comparison to typically\ud developing (TD) children and other genetic syndromes such as fragile X syndrome (FXS) could reveal\ud the language specific difficulties and help in better designing of intervention plans. Aim: To investigate\ud the linguistic abilities with detailed syntactic performance in a sample of Egyptian children with WS in\ud comparison to TD and FXS children from the same pool. The participants (n=30) included WS, TD\ud children of similar sex and age of WS group and FXS group matching the WS group for mental age. The\ud linguistic assessment was established using the Wechsler intelligence scale for children-III, Vineland\ud social maturity scale and the standardized Arabic language test. The linguistic abilities of WS group\ud were delayed even in relation to their mental age and when compared to TD children. WS group\ud manifested deficits in past verb tense, manner adverbs and in spatially related syntax. The overall WS\ud group language profile differed from that of FXS group especially regarding Pragmatics. The cognitive\ud assessment revealed differences between the groups. The in depth detailed language assessment\ud supports the presence of certain profile in the Arabic speaking WS participants. Individuals with WS do\ud need language and social intervention plans as early as possible in addition to the original required\ud visuospatial improvement strategies.

International audience; The aim of the present study is to investigate the developmental profile of three aspects of prosody function, i.e. affect, focus and turn-endings in children with Williams and in those with Down’s syndrome compared to typically developing English speaking children. The tasks used were part of the computer-based battery, Profiling Elements of Prosody for Speech Communication (Peppe, McCann & Gibon, 2003). Cross-sectional developmental trajectories linking chronological and non-verbal mental age and affects and turn-ending functions of prosody were constructed. The results showed an atypical profile in both clinical populations. More interestingly, the profiles were atypical for different reasons, suggesting multiple and possibly different developmental pathways to the acquisition of prosody in these two populations.; L’objectif de cette recherche est d’étudier le profil développemental de trois aspects de la fonction de prosodie : émotion, focalisation et fin de phrase chez des enfants porteurs 1˚ du syndrome de Williams et 2˚ du syndrome de Down en les comparant à des enfants de langue anglaise ayant un développement normal. Les tâches utilisées sont une partie de la batterie informatisée, Profiling Elements of Prosody for Speech Communication. Des trajectoires développementales mettant en lien l’âge chronologique, l’âge mental non verbal et les fonctions de la prosodie (émotion, focalisation et fin de phrase) ont été construites. Les résultats montrent des profils atypiques dans les deux populations cliniques. Cependant, les profils sont atypiques pour des raisons différentes, suggérant des trajectoires développementales différentes pour acquérir la prosodie dans ces deux populations.

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the saliency effect for word beginnings reported in children with Dyslexia (Marshall & van der Lely, 2009) can be found also in TD children. Thirty-four TD Italian children aged 8-10 completed two specifically designed tasks: a production task and a perception task. Both tasks used nonwords containing clusters consisting of plosive plus liquid (eg. pl). Clusters could be either in a stressed or in an unstressed syllable, and could be either in initial position (first syllable) or in medial position (second syllable). In the production task children were asked to repeat the non-words. In the perception task, the children were asked to discriminate between two nonwords differing in one phoneme belonging to a cluster by reporting whether two repetitions were the same or different. Results from the production task showed that children are more accurate in repeating stressed than unstressed syllables, but there was no difference with respect to position of the cluster. Results from the perception task showed that children performed more accurately when discriminating word initial contrasts than when discriminating word medial contrasts, especially if the cluster was unstressed. Implications of this finding for clinical assessments are discussed.

International audience; The purpose of this study was to investigate acoustic specificities of prosody in French-speaking and English-speaking children with Williams syndrome. Spontaneous productions based on a narrative task “Frog, Where Are You?” (Mayer, 1969) are analysed. Our study compared prosody in children with WS with two typically-developing groups, one matched on chronological age and one on developmental age. Participants were 7 French-speaking children with WS aged 6 to 13 years 7 months, and 13 English-speaking children with WS aged 6 to 13 years 11 months. Our analysis focused on the acoustic parameter of Fundamental Frequency Variation. Results discuss the following issues: 1. differences and similarities between prosodic profiles of French-speaking and English-speaking children with WS and typically-developing children, 2. differences between French-speaking and English-speaking children with WS and 3. prosodic development in children with WS.; L’objectif de l’étude est de mieux cerner les particularités acoustiques de la prosodie d’enfants porteurs du SW de langue maternelle anglaise et de langue maternelle française. Des productions spontanées ont été recueillies à l’aide de la tâche de narration « Grenouille, où es-tu ? » (Mayer, 1969). La prosodie des enfants SW est comparée à celle de deux groupes typiques, un de même âge chronologique et un de même âge développemental que le groupe avec SW La population se compose de 1. 7 enfants SW de langue française âgés entre 6 ans et 13 ans 7 mois, appariés à deux groupes typiques et 2. 13 enfants SW de langue anglaise âgés entre 6 ans et 13 ans 11 mois, appariés à deux groupes typiques. Notre analyse porte sur un paramètre acoustique de la prosodie des enfants avec SW : la Variation de la Fréquence Fondamentale. Les résultats sont discutés sur les points suivants : 1. les différences et similitudes entre les profils prosodiques des enfants avec SW et des enfants typiques de même âge chronologique ou développemental, en langue anglaise et en langue française, 2. les différences entre les enfants avec SW de langue maternelle anglaise et les enfants avec SW de langue maternelle française et 3. le développement prosodique observé chez les enfants avec SW.

This paper reports the pitch range and vowel\ud duration data from a group of children with\ud Williams syndrome (WS) in comparison with a\ud group of typically developing children matched for\ud chronological age (CA) and a group matched for\ud receptive language abilities (LA). It is found that\ud the speech of the WS group has a greater pitch\ud range and that vowels tend to be longer in duration\ud than in the speech of the typically developing\ud children. These findings are in line with the\ud impressionistic results reported by Reilly, Klima\ud and Bellugi [17].

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We report an experiment that examined 3- and 4-year-old children’s representation of the passive structure. Early studies of typically-developing children’s acquisition of the passive suggest that this construction is acquired late and – or that its acquisition is semantically constrained: children comprehend actives much earlier than passives and comprehend actional verb passives earlier than non-actional verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker & Chalkley, 1985). Conversely, some production studies have shown the passive is acquired earlier than thought: 3-4 year old children produce passives following training (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999) and priming (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva & Shimpi, 2004), however, such studies have not examined whether the passive is constrained to actional verbs early on. We report a syntactic priming study that manipulated Prime Structure (active vs. passive) and Verb Type (actional vs. non-actional). We found a strong and reliable effect of Prime Structure for children (27%) and adult controls (19%). There was, however, no effect of VerbType (Fs < 2). Participants were more likely to produce passive targets followingpassive primes than active primes, irrespective of the verb. We conclude that children do acquire an abstract syntactic representation for the passive early on (by 3-4 years) that is not constrained by verb type.