The results presented here may stimulate future research on the print knowledge of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Sources of individual differences are important to determine. Caregivers may use the intervention presented here as a potential avenue for improving children's print knowledge.

This study examined vocabulary intervention-in terms of targets and techniques-for children with language impairment receiving speech-language therapy in public schools (i.e., non-fee-paying schools) in the United States. Vocabulary treatments and targets were examined with respect to their alignment with the empirically validated practice of rich vocabulary intervention. Participants were forty-eight 5-7-year-old children participating in kindergarten or the first-grade year of school, all of whom had vocabulary-specific goals on their individualized education programmes. Two therapy sessions per child were coded to determine what vocabulary words were being directly targeted and what techniques were used for each. Study findings showed that the majority of words directly targeted during therapy were lower-level basic vocabulary words (87%) and very few (1%) were academically relevant. On average, three techniques were used per word to promote deep understanding. Interpreting findings against empirical descriptions of rich vocabulary intervention indicates that children were exposed to some but not all aspects of this empirically supported practice.

Though previous research has shown that sentence repetition (SR) is an informative tool for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals, little is understood about the skills that underlie children's performance on the task. With a population of 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals, the present study explores the contribution of verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language exposure on two SR tasks developed in English and Spanish. Results indicate that these skills may differentially underlie SR in typical versus disordered populations. Whereas the strongest predictors of English SR performance for typical bilingual children were expressive vocabulary and language exposure, bilingual children with DLD relied most heavily on verbal short-term memory. ROC curves to determine the classification accuracy of SR were conducted. Classification accuracy was excellent, with area under the curve reaching .92 for the English SR task and .87 for Spanish SR.

Existing research into speci c language impairment in Spanish utilizes primarily spontaneous production data and concludes that children do not have problems with verb niteness. In contrast, we show, through a new receptive measure, the "Grammaticality Choice Task", that the distribution of the 2 most common errors in child Spanish is su cient to distinguish language-impaired children from age and language control groups. We conclude that niteness marking on verbs is a promising clinical marker for SLI in Spanish and that spontaneous measures of niteness marking do not provide the most accurate representation of children's grammatical competence in the verbal domain in a null subject language such as Spanish.

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