Purpose: The authors' purpose was to explore the nature of the link between hearing loss (HL) and language impairment in adolescents with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (MMHL). Does language performance (generally or in certain areas) normalize at adolescence? Method: The language skills of 19 French-speaking adolescents (ages 11–15) with moderate or mild sensorineural HL were evaluated via a series of tests assessing oral and written language, including an experimental probe, and compared with typically developing adolescents and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI). Results: Language disorders were found, notably in the areas of phonology and grammar, in more than half the adolescents with MMHL; affected domains and error patterns were identical to those found in adolescents with SLI. Language scores of the adolescents with MMHL were significantly linked with degree of HL, a correlation not generally found in studies of children with MMHL. Conclusion: Normalization of language performance does not generalize at adolescence in the context of MMHL. The fact that an effect of the severity of HL was found only after childhood might be because linguistic development is basically complete at adolescence. Prior to this time, this effect could be obscured by developmental rhythms that vary from child to child.

This study investigates syntax in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), its parallelism with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and its relation to other aspects of cognition. We focus on (1) 3^rd person accusative clitic (ACC3) production, a clinical marker of SLI hypothesized to relate to WM, and (2) 1^st person accusative clitic (ACC1) production, preserved in SLI but hypothesized to be affected in ASD due to Theory-of-Mind (ToM) difficulties. Participants included 21 individuals with ASD (aged 5-16), 22 individuals with SLI (aged 5-16), age-matched and younger TD controls (N = 44). Clinical groups showed similar deficits for ACC3 and general morphosyntax. Closer analysis revealed that a subgroup of children with ASD displayed intact grammar except for ACC1, where children with SLI performed well. Better ToM scores implied better ACC1 scores in ASD. Difficulties with WM emerged for ASD and SLI and correlated only with performance on ACC3. Non-verbal reasoning was unrelated to syntactic measures.

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

Some theories of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) explain the linguistic deficits observed in terms of limitations in non-linguistic cognitive systems such as working memory. The goal of this research is to clarify the relationship between working memory and the processing of complex sentences by exploring the performance of 28 French-speaking children with DLD aged five to fourteen years and 48 typically developing children of the same age in memory and linguistic tasks. We identified predictive relationships between working memory and the comprehension and repetition of complex sentences in both groups. As for syntactic measures in spontaneous language, it is the complex spans that explain the major part of the variance in the control children. In children with DLD, however, simple spans are predictive of these syntactic measures. Our results thus reveal a robust relationship between working memory and syntactic complexity, with clinical implications for the treatment of children with DLD.

This study investigates the comprehension of passives in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Subsets of children with ASD have been previously found to present linguistic profiles reminiscent of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), a condition including difficulties with certain constructions displaying noncanonical word orders. However, research on one such construction, passives, is sparse and remains inconclusive. Furthermore, studies on typical development of passives in French are lacking. Twenty French-speaking children with ASD (mean age 9;3), including children with both normal and delayed nonverbal levels, were compared to 20 age-matched typically-developing (TD) children and to 65 younger TD children split into groups of children aged 4–5, 6–7 and 8–9 years. Various passive types were assessed via a sentence-picture matching task: eventive versus psychological, and short versus long. Most children with ASD showed difficulties on passive constructions as compared to age controls, although with the same basic pattern of performance. More subtle delay on passives was evident in a subgroup who was otherwise unimpaired on standardized assessments of vocabulary and morphosyntax, while a pronounced delay on passives was detectable in another subgroup also displaying more general lexical and morphosyntactic impairment. Difficulties with passives were dissociated from nonverbal abilities and working memory. The findings reveal that the syntax of passives is delayed in ASD, not deviant. This delay was attested even in the subgroup with seemingly intact general language skills as revealed by standardized assessments, suggesting that subtle difficulties with this construction may be present and go undetected by global language tests. Performance on passives was unrelated to nonverbal abilities, in line with work suggesting that the linguistic phenotype of some children with ASD resembles SLI. This underscores the importance of careful assessment of the language abilities of children with ASD, including those within normal IQ range.