Parent-implemented language interventions have been used for children with expressive language delays, but no study has yet been carried out using this intervention for low-risk preterm children. The current study examined the effect of a parent-implemented dialogic book reading intervention, determining also whether the intervention differently impacted low-risk preterm and full-term children. Fifty 31-month-old late talkers with their parents participated; 27 late talkers constituted the intervention group, and 23 constituted the control group. The overall results indicated that more children in the intervention group showed partial or full recovery of their lexical expressive delay and acquired the ability to produce complete sentences relative to the control group. Concerning full-term late talkers, those in the intervention group showed a higher daily growth rate of total words, nouns, function words, and complete sentences, and more children began to produce complete sentences relative to those in the control group. Concerning low-risk preterm late talkers, children in the intervention group increased their ability to produce complete sentences more than those in the control group. We conclude that a parent-focused intervention may be an effective, ecological, and cost-effective program for improving expressive lexical and syntactic skills of full-term and low-risk preterm late talkers, calling for further studies in late talkers with biological vulnerabilities.

Purpose: Wide interindividual variability characterizes language development in the general and at-risk populations of up to 3 years of age. We adopted a complex approach that considers multiple aspects of lexical and grammatical skills to identify language profiles in low-risk preterm and full-term children. We also investigated biological and environmental predictors and relations between language profiles and cognitive and motor skills.Method: We enrolled 200 thirty-month-old Italian-speaking children—consisting of 100 low-risk preterm and 100 comparable full-term children. Parents filled out the Italian version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories Infant and Toddler Short Forms (word comprehension, word production, and incomplete and complete sentence production), Parent Report of Children's Abilities–Revised (cognitive score), and Early Motor Questionnaire (fine motor, gross motor, perception–action, and total motor scores) questionnaires.Results: A latent profile analysis identified four profiles:poor(21%), with lowest receptive and expressive vocabulary and absent or limited word combination and phonological accuracy;weak(22.5%), with average receptive but limited expressive vocabulary, incomplete sentences, and absent or limited phonological accuracy;average(25%), with average receptive and expressive vocabulary, use of incomplete and complete sentences, and partial phonological accuracy; andadvanced(31.5%), with highest expressive vocabulary, complete sentence production, and phonological accuracy. Lower cognitive and motor scores characterized thepoorprofile, and lower cognitive and perception–action scores characterized theweakprofile. Having a nonworking mother and a father with lower education increased the probability of a child's assignment to thepoorprofile, whereas being small for gestational age at birth increased it for theweakprofile.Conclusions: These findings suggest a need for a person-centered and cross-domain approach to identifying children with language weaknesses and implementing timely interventions. An online procedure for data collection and data-driven analyses based on multiple lexical and grammatical skills appear to be promising methodological innovations.Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14818179

Children with special needs have encountered many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, no studies have focused on the Quality of life (QoL) of children with specific learning disabilities (SpLD). This study aimed first to examine the physical, emotional and school dimensions of QoL in a group of primary school children with SpLD. The second goal was to investigate the extent to which the experience and resilience of their mothers were related to the children’s QoL. The sample included 35 children with SpLD and 85 typically developing (TD) children, and their mothers. Three standardised questionnaires were filled in by the mothers. The findings showed that, compared to TD children, those with SpLD reported worse physical health, learning processes and school-related emotional health. Relative to the TD group, the mothers of the children with SpLD experienced more negative emotions and concern towards their children’s difficulties, where these closely correlated with the children’s QoL. Maternal resilience appeared crucial to the emotional health of these children. Our findings were discussed in terms of the need for more inclusive teaching practices that support the learning processes and the psychological health of children with SpLD, and for supporting interventions for their mothers.

Specific Learning Disorder (SLD) is a complex disorder with a strong genetic component, characterized by varying manifestations and considerable differences among children. Several studies have highlighted that difficulties in language acquisition and the presence of Developmental Language Disorders (DLDs) are frequently associated with SLD, suggesting a continuity between the two disorders. This study aimed to add evidence on the proximal and distal predictors of SLD, focusing on the eventual continuity for the presence of DLD at 4–5 years, on some linguistic and communicative abilities at 27–30 months, and on biological and environmental factors. Our sample consisted of 528 families, whose children (Italian monolingual) participated in a screening program at the age of 27–30 months. When children were on average 8.05 years old, parents were asked to answer an interview aimed at collecting information about the children’s language and learning development. Results showed that the prevalence of children with an SLD (7.01%) was in line with those reported in other similar studies. The diagnosis of SLD was significantly predicted by the previous diagnosis of DLD, by male sex/gender, and by the familial risk of SLD. Children with these characteristics had a 54% probability of presenting an SLD.

In early communicative development, children with Down syndrome (DS) make extensive use of gestures to compensate for articulatory difficulties. Here, we analyzed the symbolic strategies that underlie this gesture production, compared to that used by typically developing children. Using the same picture-naming task, 79 representational gestures produced by 10 children with DS and 42 representational gestures produced by 10 typically developing children of comparable developmental age (3;1 vs. 2;9, respectively) were collected. The gestures were analyzed and classified according to four symbolic strategies. The two groups performed all of the strategies, with no significant differences for either choice or frequency of the strategies used. The item analysis highlighted that some photographs tended to elicit the use of the same strategy in both groups. These results indicate that similar symbolic strategies are active in children with DS as in typically developing children, which suggests interesting similarities in their symbolic development.