No abstract

Purpose of Review To summarize findings about the emergence and characteristics of canonical babbling in children with late detected developmental disorders (LDDDs), such as autism spectrum disorder, Rett syndrome, and fragile X syndrome. In particular, we ask whether infants' vocal development in the first year of life contains any markers that may contribute to earlier detection of these disorders. Recent Findings Only a handful studies have investigated canonical babbling in infants with LDDDs. With divergent research paradigms and definitions applied, findings on the onset and characteristics of canonical babbling are inconsistent and difficult to compare. Infants with LDDDs showed reduced likelihood to produce canonical babbling vocalizations. If achieved, this milestone was more likely to be reached beyond the critical time window of 5-10 months. Summary Canonical babbling appears promising as a potential marker for early detection of infants at risk for developmental disorders. In-depth studies on babbling characteristics in LDDDs are warranted.

Detailed knowledge about speech development in children acquiring different languages provides important information from a clinical and a theoretical perspective: First, it provides a baseline for the evaluation of whether a child shows typical, delayed or deviant speech development. Further, differences in speech development across languages can help to understand how the phonological systems of ambient languages affects children's speech acquisition. To date, little is known about Danish. It was suggested, however, that the acquisition process might be slower for Danish-speaking children due to the "blurry" sound structure of Danish. The aim of the current study was, therefore, to investigate typical speech development in 443 Danish-speaking children, i.e. types and age of occurrence of children's phonological processes as well as on the acquisition of phones and clusters. The results showed that Danish-speaking children, in contrast to the expectations, were not delayed but advanced compared to children acquiring other languages.

The development of phonological awareness (PA), the ability to reflect on the sound structure of words independent of their meaning, has been extensively explored in English-speaking children. However, this is not the case for other languages. The aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive PA test battery for German-speaking preschool children, considering psycholinguistic, linguistic, and cognitive aspects and to carry out analyses of its psychometric properties. Cross-sectional data from a sample of 55 children (CA 4;0-6;11 years) were collected. Preliminary findings confirm validity and reliability of the test battery, and support previous findings that PA develops from larger to smaller linguistic units. Phoneme-level tasks were consistently associated with letter knowledge. The new instrument is a promising tool for basic research (e.g. cross-linguistic comparisons of PA development) as well as for clinical and educational practice (e.g. planning speech and language therapy or literacy-oriented intervention).