Open research questions in Language Development and Disorders

What the literature leaves open

• Future research should focus on directly examining the speech characteristics of Hebrew-speaking children with CAS to better identify language-specific diagnostic markers.

  Speech Characteristics of Childhood Apraxia of Speech in Hebrew-Speaking Children · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should investigate whether children are sensitive to these cues in real time and explore additional discourse-level variables, as well as finergrained lexical effects, to better understand how different sources of information interact in the acquisition of DOM.

  Global Cues to Spanish Differential Object Marking in Monolingual and Bilingual Child-Directed Speech · 2026 · DOI

• This could be a distinctive feature of CDS that should be examined further in the context of modifications that characterized infant-directed communication. Although previous work on adult language has identified such global factors (Laca, 2006), their presence and potential role in child-directed speech (CDS) have not been systematically examined.

  Global Cues to Spanish Differential Object Marking in Monolingual and Bilingual Child-Directed Speech · 2026 · DOI

• Our results are very applicable to the Australian context, and future research may examine developmental patterns of both domains in other countries and education systems, or seek to replicate these findings.

  Developmental patterns of receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension from age 4 to 14: A sequential latent growth model design · 2026 · DOI

• Our results suggest that further research into the relationship between SES and sentence comprehension is warranted; this may be particularly pertinent in the context of bilingual language development.

  Preschoolers’ Early Sentence Comprehension: Comparing Bilingual and Monolingual Children and the Role of Executive Function and Vocabulary Development · 2026 · DOI

• Although microstructural measures and their relations to vocabulary have been examined previously and are being examined in ongoing work with this cohort, future research should investigate whether microstructural skills mediate the relationship between vocabulary and narrative macrostructure across languages and tasks. Several limitations of the present study should be considered.

  Vocabulary and Input Quality Shape the Farsi Heritage Narrative Macrostructure in Farsi–English School-Aged Children · 2026 · DOI

• The neurobiological mechanisms behind these changes remain unclear, especially in children and adolescents, but initial studies indicate distinct neurobiological underpinnings between syndromes.

  Neural correlates of language disfunction in psychiatric disorders: a developmental perspective · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should expand upon these findings in several ways. First, additional elicitation contexts, such as conversations, expository tasks, and argumentation, may provide a richer, broader picture of children’s complex syntax, capturing structures that narratives underrepresent.

  Trajectories of syntactic complexity and subordination across Spanish and English in bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder · 2026 · DOI

• Syntactic difficulties are widely reported in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), yet detailed evidence from European Portuguese (EP) remains scarce.

  What do they say and how? A comparative syntactic characterization of children with and without Developmental Language Disorder in European Portuguese · 2026 · DOI

• Building upon our previously validated Family Stress Model, using 14 key indicators to represent the five key stressors proposed by Masarik and Conger (2017), our analyses suggest a mechanism through which experiences with poverty may disrupt early language development, although further exploration of the impacts of family dynamics within this crucial developmental period is warranted.

  Modeling the mechanisms through which conditions of poverty are associated with late language emergence in young children · 2025 · DOI

• Future research could explore the role of parents’ attitudes to better understand how these beliefs align with their language practices and how they affect children’s vocabulary outcomes, especially across different types of bilingual families. Future work should examine vocabulary development in the heritage language, rather than focusing solely on societal languages.

  Parental Language Mixing in Montreal: Rates, Predictors, and Relation to Infants’ Vocabulary Size · 2025 · DOI

• Although the current data are limited in terms of the number of participants involved, our findings contribute to the field by stressing the importance of taking both the structural features and the discourse context into consideration when analyzing the mechanism of CLI in the use of referring expressions.

  Is Referent Reintroduction More Vulnerable to Crosslinguistic Influence? An Analysis of Referential Choice among Japanese–English Bilingual Children · 2024 · DOI

• Conversational turn-taking is a vital part of early communication, but to date, it remains unclear whether the quantity and quality of language input differs between focused and regular interactions that vary in the number of turns.

  Are All Conversational Turns Equal? Parental Language Input and Child Language in Children with Hearing Loss during Daily Interactions · 2024 · DOI

• The study attempted to address a significant gap in Greek pragmatics by providing empirical data for the previously understudied 4–11 age range.

  The Development of Children’s Request Strategies in L1 Greek · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should explore whether early intervention in this vein would impact the course of children at-risk for dyslexia due to early language delays.

  Spoken language delay in toddlerhood predicts late childhood language outcomes in dyslexia: evidence from retrospective parent-report · 2026 · DOI

• However, causality in this multilevel theoretical framework investigation of growth in child language skills starting from community change that influences parent/caregiver behavior change remains to be demonstrated.

  Kansas City Brain Builders: associations between a multisectoral community language nutrition intervention and change in practices and growth in child language over two years · 2026 · DOI

• Non-interactive language acquisition, often termed "unexpected bilingualism", is a growing but underexplored phenomenon in autism research, especially at the group level.

  Non-interactive and naturalistic language exposure in autism: An investigation of narrative production in bilingual children · 2026 · DOI

• Importantly, this difference was limited to the absolute PWC level; neither the Test × Age nor the Test × Age2 interaction was significant, indicating that the age-related PWC trajectory did not differ significantly between the two instruments.

  Age-specific agreement between Hi-DongDong and UTAP-2 articulation assessments in Korean children aged 2–13 years · 2026 · DOI

• This study was able to confirm many findings of previous studies dealing with Russian-speaking families in Germany and the sociolinguistic situation of Russian as a heritage language in Germany.

  Influence of Family Language Policies on Language Proficiency across Generations: A Study of Russian-Speaking Families in Germany · 2024 · DOI

• The linguistic effects on incorrect zero plurals are rather inconclusive and point to a sort of emergency default status of zero plurals: when no other plural form is available for a child, they tend to produce the singular form, particularly in the test, whereas such forms are rare in spontaneous speech.

  German Noun Plurals in Simultaneous Bilingual vs. Successive Bilingual vs. Monolingual Kindergarten Children: The Role of Linguistic and Extralinguistic Variables · 2024 · DOI

• There was no impact on the mastery of the morphological rule itself (words with non-changing stems and regular suffixes), but rather, an impact on the acquisition of the lexical and morpho-lexical aspects of the system (words with changing stems and/or irregular morphology) was observed, and this impact was limited to the second grade.

  Mothers’ Education, Family Language Policy, and Hebrew Plural Formation among Bilingual and Monolingual Children · 2024 · DOI

• These preliminary findings support further investigation of parent-child SBR as a naturalistic context for understanding communication, engagement, and multimodal participation in young children with DS.

  Shared book reading in Down syndrome: parent-child interaction, language, and communication compared with typically developing peers · 2026 · DOI

• One challenge in achieving comparability across studies lies in the distinction between etic and emic perspectives on concepts such as language, standard, dialect, and accent. The etic perspective refers to an external and analytical description of a given concept provided by researchers, focusing on objective and observable aspects.

  Quantifying Experience with Accented Speech to Study Monolingual and Bilingual School-Aged Children’s Speech Processing · 2025 · DOI

• Through testing DOM in both the productive and receptive domains in bilingual children and adolescents aged ten to fourteen years, this study makes inroads into elucidating the individual factors that shape HL acquisition during this understudied developmental period.

  On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search) · 2024 · DOI

• In three experiments, we asked how this sparse semantic knowledge shapes what learners extract from distributional experience and whether the resulting semantic expectations facilitate word learning.

  How semantic seeds shape what can be learned from the input: Evidence for semantic generalization over distributional categories · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Language Development and Disorders

• Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants · Science · 1996 · 3,595 citations
• Variability in Early Communicative Development · Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 1994 · 1,967 citations
• Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children · Review of Educational Research · 1979 · 1,870 citations
• The Specificity of Environmental Influence: Socioeconomic Status Affects Early Vocabulary Development Via Maternal Speech · Child Development · 2003 · 1,614 citations
• The phonological loop as a language learning device. · Psychological Review · 1998 · 1,485 citations
• Language of Early- and Later-identified Children With Hearing Loss · PEDIATRICS · 1998 · 1,450 citations
• Joint Attention and Early Language · Child Development · 1986 · 1,405 citations
• Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. · Developmental Psychology · 1991 · 1,155 citations
• Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a causal connection? · Journal of Memory and Language · 1990 · 1,072 citations
• SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months · Developmental Science · 2012 · 981 citations

Most recent work

• Within‐Day Variations in Infant Body Position Predict Caregiver Speech Input · Developmental Science · 2026
• Figurative Drawing Abilities Map onto Distinct Cognitive Mechanism from Non-Figurative Abilities in 77,000 Participants with Neurodevelopmental Disorders · medRxiv · 2026
• Caregivers' Experiences of Assessment and Treatment for Their Child With Childhood Apraxia of Speech: An International Questionnaire Study · American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology · 2026
• Pragmatic and cognitive abilities in children and adolescents after pediatric brain tumor · Journal of Neurolinguistics · 2026
• Non-social Language Exposure Facilitates Autistic Children’s Language Learning · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · 2026
• Kia Tīmata Pai (Best Start) Video Project: Effects of an oral language professional development program (ENRICH) on educator-toddler conversations · Early Childhood Research Quarterly · 2026
• Clinical Focus: Clinical Applications of the Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) Protocol for Assessment of Personal Event Narrative Language · Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools · 2026
• Modelling children's grammar learning via caregiver feedback in natural conversations · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2026
• Maximising the Impact of Speech and Language Therapy for Children With Speech Sound Disorder (The MISLToe‐SSD) Study: Developing a Core Outcome Set (COS) for Routine Data Collection From UK NHS Speech and Language Therapy Services · International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders · 2026
• Cortical tracking of natural speech by children with developmental language disorder (DLD): An EEG speech decoding investigation · Brain and Language · 2026

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