Investigating pausing and gesturing patterns in children with and without developmental language disorder

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51 children using a storytelling procedure ( MAIN – Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives). Participants were 18 bilingual Russian-Hebrew preschool children (8 with DLD), 17 monolingual Russian speakers (9 with DLD), and 16 monolingual Hebrew speakers (5 with DLD) aged 5;6–6;7. Referential expressions were coded for form (noun phrase [NP] or pronoun) and character function (Introduction or Maintenance). Analyses addressed the effects of proficiency group (TLD/DLD), language group (bilingual/monolingual), and language (Russian/Hebrew) on inadequate pronoun use and definiteness. Results demonstrated that children in all groups introduced characters using NPs. Children with DLD used more morpho-syntactically inadequate pronouns, such as incorrect gender, while both children with DLD and those with TLD used similar numbers of discourse-pragmatically inadequate pronouns. Bilinguals used more morpho-syntactically inadequate pronouns than monolinguals. In Hebrew, bilingual children with DLD omitted definite articles for character Maintenance more frequently than bilingual children with TLD and monolingual Hebrew-speaking children with DLD. Wrong gender assignment indicates that children with DLD have difficulties with morpho-syntactic constraints. Omission of definite articles for character Maintenance indicates a possibility of both morpho-syntactic and semantic difficulties that bilingual children with DLD acquiring Hebrew face. The results offer insight into the nature of the difficulty observed in bilingual children with DLD in using referential expressions.

Approximately 9.9 % of children present with difficulties in language development (DLD), 7.6 % without serious additional impairments and 2.3 % associated with languagerelevant comorbidities, e.g., hearing loss. Notably, in a consensus statement by experts in German-speaking countries, in the guideline presented here, and further in this article, all of these disorders are referred to as "developmental language disorders" (DLD), whereas the international consortium CATALISE only refers to those without comorbidities as DLD. DLDs are among the most commonly treated childhood disorders and, if persistent, often reduce educational and socio-economic outcome. Children in their third year of life with developmental language delay (late talkers, LT) are at risk of a later DLD. This German interdisciplinary clinical practice guideline reflects current knowledge regarding evidence-based interventions for developmental language delay and disorders. A systematic literature review was conducted on the effectiveness of interventions for DLD. The guideline recommends parent training (Hedges g = 0.38 to 0.82) for LTs with expressive language delay, language therapy (Cohen's d = -0.20 to 0.90) for LTs with additional receptive language delay or further DLD risk factors, phonological or integrated phonological treatment methods (Cohen's d = 0.89 to 1.04) for phonological speech sound disorders (SSDs), a motor approach for isolated phonetic SSDs (non-DLD), and for lexical-semantic and morpho-syntactic impairments combinations of implicit and explicit intervention approaches (including input enrichment, modeling techniques, elicitation methods, creation of production opportunities, metalinguistic- approaches, visualizations; Cohen's d = 0.89-1.04). Recom mendations were also made for DLD associated with pragmatic-communicative impairment, bi-/ multilingualism, hearing loss, intellectual disability, autism-spectrum disorders, selective mutism, language- relevant syndromes or multiple disabilities, and for intensive inpatient language rehabilitation. Early parent- and child-centered speech and language intervention implementing evidence-based intervention approaches, frequency, and settings, combined with educational language support, can improve the effectiveness of management of developmental language delay and disorders.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts various aspects of children's language abilities, including the processing of inflectional morphology. Prior research suggests that children with DLD exhibit deficits in processing speed and sensitivity to grammatical inflections, yet the relationship between these deficits remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between processing speed and sensitivity to inflectional morphology in children with DLD, focusing on their real-time processing abilities in response to regular past tense, third person singular, and regular plural inflections at different rates of sentence articulation. Eighteen children with DLD and 18 age-matched controls underwent word monitoring tasks that assessed sensitivity to grammaticality of inflections in sentences presented at normal and slow rates of articulation. At a normal rate of articulation, children with DLD demonstrated slower response times and reduced sensitivity to grammaticality across all inflections compared to controls. When the articulation rate was slowed, children with DLD showed improved sensitivity, particularly to regular plural and third person singular inflections, although deficits in processing the regular past tense persisted. The findings suggest a significant relationship between processing speed and inflectional morphology sensitivity in children with DLD. Slower articulation rates improved grammatical sensitivity for certain inflections, highlighting the potential of tailored interventions that consider processing speed limitations. Persistent difficulties with the regular past tense inflection indicate the need for targeted support for children with DLD in this area. What is already known on this subject Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have a wide range of language difficulties, but deficits in inflectional morphology are regarded as a 'hallmark' of the disorder. Children with DLD are also very likely to show deficits in speed of processing, although it is not known if a 'slowness to process' can causally explain the language difficulties these children experience. What this study adds to existing knowledge When grammatical sensitivity was measured using an online real-time task, children with DLD showed widespread inflectional deficits when sentences were spoken at a normal conversational rate. When sentence articulation rate was slowed down, children with DLD were faster, more accurate and more sensitive to the grammaticality of constructions. However, deficits in the regular past tense remained persistent, even in this slow-rate condition. What are the clinical implications of this work? This study has implications for clinical and educational practices that work with children with DLD to improve their language skills. The findings of this study show that when children with DLD are given more time to process incoming information, their grammatical skills significantly improve. This study also shows that deficits in the regular past tense are persistent, and children are likely need extensive and intensive support with this particular grammatical feature.

Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population. Furthermore, we aimed to compare five scoring systems for evaluating children's MSRT performance. In Study 1, the MSRT was administered to 59 typically developing (TD) children aged 3;6 (years;months) to 6;5 in China. The task was examined regarding its ability to correlate with language indices derived from children's narrative samples. In Study 2, both a TD and a DLD group were recruited to investigate the task's sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios to distinguish between children with and without DLD. Study 1 showed that, using four of the five scoring methods, TD children's performance on the MSRT significantly correlated with all the language measures derived from narratives. Study 2 showed that the MSRT was able to differentiate children with and without DLD. The MSRT is a promising tool to reflect language abilities and identify DLD in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Based on the current evidence, we recommend that researchers and clinicians select the number of errors in the syllable method or the binary method when scoring responses to meet their specific needs. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19386257.

Purpose Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have weaknesses in executive functioning (EF), specifically in tasks testing interference control and working memory. It is unknown how EF develops in children with DLD, if EF abilities are related to DLD severity and persistence, and if EF weaknesses expand to selective attention. This study aimed to address these gaps. Method Data from 78 children with DLD and 39 typically developing (TD) children were collected at three times with 1-year intervals. At Time 1, the children were 5 or 6 years old. Flanker, Dot Matrix, and Sky Search tasks tested interference control, visuospatial working memory, and selective attention, respectively. DLD severity was based on children's language ability. DLD persistence was based on stability of the DLD diagnosis. Results Performance on all tasks improved in both groups. TD children outperformed children with DLD on interference control. No differences were found for visuospatial working memory and selective attention. An interference control gap between the DLD and TD groups emerged between Time 1 and Time 2. Severity and persistence of DLD were related to interference control and working memory; the impact on working memory was stronger. Selective attention was unrelated to DLD severity and persistence. Conclusions Age and DLD severity and persistence determine whether or not children with DLD show EF weaknesses. Interference control is most clearly impaired in children with DLD who are 6 years and older. Visuospatial working memory is impaired in children with severe and persistent DLD. Selective attention is spared.

Understanding factors influencing wellbeing is crucial for the development of effective services. Aphasia in older individuals and developmental language disorder (DLD) in children significantly affect how people live and function. Despite the increasing stroke incidence in young adults and the growing recognition of DLD as a lifelong disorder, the literature lacks evidence on the wellbeing of young adults, aged between 18 and 40 years old, with these conditions. To identify factors influencing wellbeing in young adults with aphasia and DLD. This cross-sectional between-group study involved 78 young adults with aphasia, DLD and no language impairments, with mean (SD) age of 30.5 (6.38) years. A total of 12 measures were used to assess wellbeing, language, cognition, health, emotional distress, social functioning and psychological resources. Feasibility and acceptability were informed by a pilot-study. One-way-unrelated analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare groups on language, cognition and wellbeing, while correlation analyses identified factors influencing wellbeing in each group. No significant differences were found between clinical groups in language and cognitive profiles, with both scoring lower than those with no language impairments. The wellbeing of individuals with aphasia and DLD was similar to that of adults with no language impairments. Health, emotional distress and social support were common drivers of wellbeing among all groups, with positive performance in those scales indicating better wellbeing. Language and self-esteem showed significant links with wellbeing for those with DLD, but not for the aphasia group. The higher the self-esteem level of people with DLD, the higher their wellbeing rating. Interestingly, language was negatively related to wellbeing in people with DLD, with higher language scores correlating with lower levels of wellbeing. Aphasia and DLD share factors affecting wellbeing, but the different origins of the disorders seem to influence the overall nature of wellbeing. Wellbeing in DLD is primarily impacted by the language disorder, whereas in aphasia it is influenced by its secondary to the disorder characteristics and primarily emotional health. This study highlights the need for holistic therapy and ongoing psychosocial support to optimize services for young adults with these impairments. What is already known on the subject Aphasia and DLD significantly impact social and emotional aspects of life. However, knowledge about wellbeing in young adults with these disorders remains limited. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge This research is the first to compare wellbeing in aphasia and DLD. It highlights the impact of several psychosocial factors and clinical characteristics including language on wellbeing, considering whether individuals developed language disorders during childhood or acquired them later in adult life. While there is a small amount of evidence on wellbeing in young adults with DLD, this is the first study to investigate wellbeing in young adults with aphasia. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The type of language disorder may influence wellbeing in diverse ways. Speech and language therapists must evaluate the impact of these disorders on young adults' wellbeing. Rehabilitation should consider both personal factors and external support systems, following appropriate care models. Our findings suggest that aphasia interventions might benefit from focusing on enhancing emotional wellbeing and social networks, particularly in young adults. For individuals with DLD, it appears that the emphasis should be on improving communication skills by addressing functional constraints in social interactions and considering their psychological resources. Further research is needed to confirm these potential intervention strategies. An interdisciplinary approach is essential for optimal outcomes.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markers zai- and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective -zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective -le and imperfective zai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g., zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs.

Background and aims Recent research indicates that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often also score lower than their peers with typical development (TD) on tasks testing nonverbal executive functioning (EF). This study investigated whether there is evidence that children with DLD use linguistic and EF resources to support their lexical and syntactic development. Three questions were addressed: (1) How do children with DLD develop in the domains of lexicon and syntax, and how does their development compare to TD controls? (2) To what extent do children with DLD show reciprocal relations between lexical and syntactic skills, and how does this compare to TD controls? (3) Is EF ability related to DLD children’s lexical and syntactic skills, and how does this compare to TD controls? Methods Data from 117 children (N DLD = 78; N TD = 39) were collected three times with yearly intervals. At time 1, the children were 5 or 6 years old. Standardized receptive vocabulary and sentence repetition tests measured lexicon and syntax, respectively. Nonverbal EF tasks tested selective attention, interference control and working memory. Cross-lagged analyses were conducted to determine the direction of relationships. Results Both groups showed stable lexical and syntactic growth. In children with DLD, but not in TD controls, syntactic skills predicted lexical skills. In the DLD group, EF predicted lexical skills. Reversely, in the TD group, lexical skills predicted EF. Conclusions The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that the lexical development of children with DLD is supported by both their verbal abilities in the domain of syntax and their nonverbal EF abilities. Implications Interventions that improve the syntactic and EF abilities of children with DLD may have spreading effects and positively impact on word learning by children with DLD.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), previously known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI), is a common developmental disorder that affects both preschool and school aged children. The language characteristics of children with DLD vary considerably with the main challenge being the learning of language structures and morphosyntactic and lexical limitations (Leonard, 2014). Research has shown that when it comes to bilinguals with language deficits caution should be taken, since they may arise from impairment due to DLD but can also be caused by insufficient exposure to and limited knowledge of the target language (Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004). A method that has often been used to investigate the language features of monolingual and monolingual children with DLD is to examine their narrative abilities, since narratives provide a quasi-naturalistic measure of children’s spontaneous language and reflect distinctive structural linguistic changes through childhood and adolescence. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of recent studies on the narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual pre-school and primary school children with DLD. Therefore, it focuses on 13 research articles published since 2010 until present that met the inclusion criteria set in this review. The selected studies fell under three main areas: 1) studies assessing the narrative skills of monolingual children with DLD/SLI, 2) studies comparing bilingual children of typical development and bilinguals with DLD/SLI and 3) studies comparing monolingual and bilingual children with DLD/SLI. The majority of studies reported significant differences in the narrative performance between monolinguals with and without DLD and between bilinguals with and without DLD. No significant difference is observed in the performance between monolinguals and bilinguals of typical language development, yet performance differences are noted between monolinguals with DLD and bilinguals with the same language impairment. Microstructure seems to be greatly affected by DLD with macrostructure being affected the less.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with receptive and expressive language, which can affect their participation in everyday interactions with others. This, in turn, can impact their ongoing language development and ability to form and maintain friendships. This paper describes the development of a complex intervention, 'Better Conversations with Developmental Language Disorder' (BCDLD), designed with and for school-aged children with DLD and their main carers. Medical Research Council guidelines for developing complex interventions were used to inform the design and early-stage evaluation of BCDLD, including consultation with key interest holders at each stage of the project; appraisal of relevant literature and articulation of programme theory. A review of the evidence for communication partner training revealed a gap in the research and clinical practice for school-aged children with DLD. Research with other clinical groups suggests potential for enhancing everyday interactions through work with conversation partners. Theory underpinning the proposed intervention, which was identified from the review, included social interactionist and constructivist accounts of child language acquisition, behaviour change theory and applied conversation analysis. Children and parents with experience of living with DLD identified barriers to their everyday conversation to inform intervention content and delivery. Speech and Language Therapists gave feedback on the draft intervention protocol and advised on how BCDLD could be implemented in clinical practice. This paper reports the development of a theoretically-informed, conversation-based intervention for children with DLD and their conversation partners, which aims to improve the content and flow of their everyday interactions, whilst supporting children's language development. Synthesising knowledge from the literature, input from children living with DLD, parents and professionals in the field enabled the design and early-stage evaluation of BCDLD. What is already known about this subject There is a gap in the literature and clinical practice for a conversation-based intervention, designed for school-aged children with DLD and their parents or carers. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This project followed Medical Research Council guidelines for early development of a novel intervention, 'Better Conversations with Developmental Language Disorder'. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The programme is ready to progress to the next stage of development, including manualisation and training, leading to feasibility studies within NHS and education settings.

Language exposure is known to be a key factor influencing bilingual vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. There is, however, a lack of knowledge in terms of exposure effects in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and, especially, in interaction with age of onset (AoO) of second language acquisition. In the Helsinki longitudinal SLI study (HelSLI), we investigated the receptive and expressive second language (L2) vocabulary performance and cross-sectional vocabulary development of sequentially bilingual children with TD and DLD in order to resolve whether the groups could be differentiated based on their vocabulary performance. More importantly, we examined the effects of AoO and exposure in the vocabulary performance of these two bilingual groups. A total of 70 children with DLD from a hospital clinic and 82 with TD from kindergartens were recruited. Children were 3-7 years old with different AoOs for the L2 and varying degrees of language exposure. Multiple regression analysis was used to compare the groups in two receptive and three expressive vocabulary tests while considering the effects of AoO and language exposure. Children with TD outperformed children with DLD in both receptive and expressive vocabulary measures. Exposure predicted vocabulary but AoO did not. The effect of exposure was different in TD and DLD groups in receptive but not in expressive vocabulary. Additionally, the interaction of exposure and AoO was found for receptive vocabulary, but similarly in both groups. With increasing exposure, a difference in performance between the groups became more notable in receptive vocabulary compared with the expressive vocabulary. Bilingual children with TD and DLD can be differentiated by using L2 vocabulary tests when exposure is taken into consideration. Non-significant AoO effects in 3-7 year olds suggest flexibility in terms of when to start L2 immersion. However, exposure is important, and especially children with DLD would need a substantial amount of it relative to their TD peers, so that they would not fall even further behind over time. Differences in benefiting from exposure in receptive mode might offer clinicians and kindergarten personnel an insight for evaluating challenges in bilingual development. Severe challenges in vocabulary development in the DLD group also call for both individually targeted small-group activities for learning words as well as strategies for strengthening vocabulary in various environments and everyday life situations. What this paper adds What is already known on the subject Language exposure is often found to explain more of the variation compared with AoO in early L2 vocabulary. On the other hand, it has been suggested by some researchers, but not all, that AoO effects would be found. Exposure and AoO might also interact differently depending on the task and whether the development is typical or disordered. Contrary to the clinical observation, diagnostic value of receptive vocabulary has often been questioned. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study indicates that receptive vocabulary might be useful in differentiating bilingual TD and DLD. Language exposure effects differ between TD and DLD groups, but depending on task. Lower performance, but also slower cross-sectional development, is found in receptive vocabulary for children with DLD. Interaction between language exposure and AoO stresses the importance of taking both into consideration when studying bilingual development. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? L2 vocabulary tests can be used in differentiating bilingual children with TD and DLD when exposure is taken into consideration. Difficulties using exposure and, hence, slower development in children with DLD suggest that especially receptive vocabulary might be diagnostic by the accumulating exposure. Investing in ways of supporting vocabulary development through small-group activities and in everyday situations of bilingual children at risk of DLD is highly recommended. This is important to prevent them from incrementally falling further behind their TD peers over time. A limited AoO effect suggests that families have more flexibility in terms of when to place their child in L2 immersion in their early years.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, we considered the case of a child with developmental language disorder (DLD) who could not go to the hospital on time to receive timely rehabilitation treatment due to disrupted hospital operations. The application of cloud-based rehabilitation platforms has provided significant advantages and convenience for children with DLD in-home remote rehabilitation. Among them, the JingYun Rehab Cloud Platform is the most widely used in mainland China. It is an interactive telerehabilitation system developed by Weixin Huang that delivers personalized home rehabilitation for special education children. In this study, we used the JingYun Rehab Cloud Platform to investigate the extent to which cloud-based rehabilitation is effective for children with DLD in terms of language and cognitive outcomes. This was a prospective cohort study including all children who were evaluated and diagnosed with DLD through Sign-Significant Relations and were followed up at the rehabilitation clinic of our institute. We followed 162 children with DLD for 3 months, including 84 children with DLD who participated in remote cloud-based rehabilitation on the JingYun Rehab Cloud Platform and 78 children with DLD as the control group who underwent home-based rehabilitation. Language abilities of both groups were assessed using the Chinese version of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised. Several measures of training performance (language, memory, and cognition tasks) were assessed before and after cloud-based rehabilitation in the remote cloud-based rehabilitation group. Children with DLD in the cloud-based rehabilitation group performed significantly better in language abilities, as assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, than children with DLD in the control group. Furthermore, for children who participated in remote cloud-based rehabilitation, the frequency of training sessions was proportional to their performance on language, memory, and cognition tasks. This study demonstrated the effectiveness of cloud-based rehabilitation on the JingYun Rehab Cloud Platform in treating children with DLD.

Two reasons may explain the discrepant findings regarding declarative memory in developmental language disorder (DLD) in the literature. First, standardized tests are one of the primary tools used to assess declarative memory in previous studies. It is possible they are not sensitive enough to subtle memory impairment. Second, the system underlying declarative memory is complex, and thus results may vary depending on the types of encoding and retrieval processes measured (e.g., item specific or relational) and/or task demands (e.g., recall or recognition during memory retrieval). To adopt an experimental paradigm to examine episodic memory functioning in adolescents with and without DLD, with the focus on memory recognition of item-specific and relational information. Two groups of adolescents, one with DLD (n = 23; mean age = 16.73 years) and the other without (n = 23; mean age = 16.75 years), participated in the study. The Relational and Item-Specific Encoding (RISE) paradigm was used to assess the effect of different encoding processes on episodic memory retrieval in DLD. The advantage of using the RISE task is that both item-specific and relational encoding/retrieval can be examined within the same learning paradigm. Adolescents with DLD and those with typical language development showed comparable engagement during the encoding phase. The DLD group showed significantly poorer item recognition than the comparison group. Associative recognition was not significantly different between the two groups; however, there was a non-significant trend for to be poorer in the DLD group than in the comparison group, suggesting a possible impairment in associative recognition in individuals with DLD, but to a lesser magnitude. These results indicate that adolescents with DLD have difficulty with episodic memory retrieval when stimuli are encoded and retrieved without support from contextual information. Associative recognition is relatively less affected than item recognition in adolescents with DLD.

The current study aimed to fill the gap in research on factors predictive of word reading in French-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by finding out whether the same predictors of written word recognition evidenced in typically developing children would be retrieved in children with DLD or if some predictors could be specific to children with DLD, especially in the phonological domain. In total, 38 children with DLD and 44 control children were followed from 6 to 8 years in a longitudinal design including two time points: (1) just before explicit reading instruction, where potential predictors of reading were assessed (oral language skills and reading-related skills), and (2) after 2 years of learning to read, where isolated word reading and text reading were assessed in addition to the assessment of oral language skills and reading-related skills. The study mainly showed that the predictors of reading identified in typically developing children are retrieved in children with DLD except for phonemic awareness; the latter result was probably explained by a floor effect. Among the predictors in the phonological domain, phonological instability appeared as a promising predictor of reading irregular words. These results are consistent with the findings of many previous studies and tend to confirm the idea of a strong link between oral phonological skills and written word recognition skills; they also call for attention to specific features in the phonological development of children with DLD when learning to read, particularly phonological instability as a direction for future exploration.

There is a growing body of research on developmental language disorder (DLD), but very few studies have focused on the role of cognitive abilities in adulthood. The present study explored the relationship between cognition and language in adults with and without DLD. Sixty participants, 30 language typical (LT) adults and 30 with DLD, completed a battery of online cognitive and language assessments. Cognitive tasks included language analytic ability (the ability to recognize the grammatical functions of sentence elements), nonverbal IQ, explicit learning of form-meaning pairings, implicit statistical learning, and speed of automatization. Language assessments included two grammar tasks (assessing morphosyntax) and vocabulary. Accuracy and reaction time measures were obtained for all tasks. Between-group differences demonstrated that language remains an area of difficulty for adults with DLD. Language analytic ability was a significant predictor of grammatical and vocabulary knowledge in the LT group and of grammar in the DLD group. In addition, we found that explicit learning of form-meaning pairings predicted linguistic outcomes in adults with DLD. We found small or no differences for all the other cognitive abilities; this is in line with previous studies that report a relative "catch up" in cognitive abilities in adults with DLD. Response times for the DLD group were slower in both linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks. Our results demonstrate that language difficulties in DLD persist into adulthood. Regarding cognitive measures, we show that language analytic ability is a key predictor of linguistic outcomes in both groups, and explicit learning of form-meaning pairings predicts grammar and vocabulary in the DLD group. These findings have important implications for clinical interventions, as they suggest that both implicit (fast, effortless, and unconscious) and explicit (slow, effortful, and conscious) processes are relevant to language. In addition, adults with DLD may require additional processing time in cognitive and linguistic tasks.