The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early communicative gestures, in productive vocabulary, and in combining words. The difference increased with age. Boys were not found to be more variable than girls. Despite extensive variation in language skills between language communities, the difference between girls and boys remained. This suggests that the difference is caused by robust factors that do not change between language communities.
Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of discourse production. We compared the distribution, the duration and the frequency of speech dysfluencies in the spontaneous discourse of 20 AD patients with 20 age, gender and socio-economically matched healthy peers. We found that patients and controls differ along several lines: patients' discourse displays more frequent silent pauses, which occur more often outside syntactic boundaries and are followed by more frequent words. Overall patients show more lexical retrieval and planning difficulties, but where controls signal their planning difficulties using filled pauses, AD patients do not.
This study compares early grammatical and lexical acquisition in 323 preterm and 166 full-term children at 24 months. The French MacArthur-Bates parental report was employed for analysis. Gestational age and birth order showed a significant effect on vocabulary size and grammatical distribution. Preterm children showed fewer words and produced more games, routines and animal noises words. Except for the group of extremely premature children, first-born children in each gestational age group produced more words than second-born. In contrast, first-born children exhibited more predicates than second-born children. It is concluded that preterm children show delayed rather than deviant language development.
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