A follow-up study on Italian late talkers: Development of language, short-term memory, phonological awareness, impulsiveness, and attention

Abstract

This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4-6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of cognitive-neuropsychological tests to assess grammatical comprehension, vocabulary development, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness, planning and visuomotor coordination, and attention and impulsiveness. No differences were found in the results between the two groups in the domains of attention, impulsiveness, and visuomotor planning, but in the domain of syntactic competence late talkers developed particular difficulties in the comprehension of passive negative sentences compared to average talkers. Late talkers also performed significantly worse on the nonword repetition task, which measures abilities closely connected with verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness.In the past two decades, researchers and clinicians have increasingly focused on the early characterization and identification of young children with delayed language acquisition, termed late talkers (LTs). LTs are identified on the basis of their restricted expressive language abilities when they are approximately 2 years of age; their main characteristic is a considerable delay in linguistic production

Narrative skill and syntactic complexity in school‐age children with and without late language emergence

“…LLE was diagnosed using the following five criteria. First, children exhibited a reduced vocabulary size, defined as a score below the 10th percentile for their ages on the CDI, similar to procedures in Thal et al (1991) and D’Odorico et al (2007). For the children older than 30 months, vocabulary production scores were below the 10th percentile for 30 months.…”

“…Fifth, parents reported no indication of autism or other neurological disorder. As in D’Odorico et al (2007) and Paul (1996), receptive language abilities were not directly assessed at intake. The average level of maternal education was 14.45 years (SD = 2.77).…”

“…Thal et al (1991) used a score in the lowest 10th percentile on an early version of the CDI as their diagnostic criterion for LLE; while Girolametto et al (2001) used a cut‐off of the lowest 5th percentile. The CDI has been translated into other languages, including Italian, where D’Odorico et al (2007) also employed the lowest 10th percentile as a cut‐off score for LLE.…”

Long-Term Effects of a Parent-Based Language Intervention on Language Outcomes and Working Memory for Late-Talking Toddlers

“…At the age of 5, former late talkers differed from children with typical language development in comprehension of passive negative sentences and non-word repetition as a component of working memory (D'odorico, Assanelli, Franco, & Jakob, 2007). These abilities are crucial for acquisition of written language and achievement in school.…”

Associations Between Toddler-Age Communication and Kindergarten-Age Self-Regulatory Skills

“…Despite the equivocal findings, the literature tends to provide stronger support for an association between expressive vocabulary delay and internalizing behaviors, especially withdrawal, than for externalizing behaviors. Some studies indicate no differences between late talkers and children with typical language in attention and impulsiveness (D'Odorico, Assanelli, Franco, & Jacob, 2007) or fail to find evidence for expressive vocabulary delay at the age of two years being a risk factor for later behavioral and emotional disturbances (Whitehouse, Robinson, & Zubrick, 2011; see also Rescorla, Ross, & McClure, 2007).…”