Language comprehension in typical and late talkers

What is it about?

Our study tests two groups of 2-year-olds: typical talkers and late talkers (i.e., children not speaking many words or sentences). We find that 2-year-old late talkers are slower than typical talkers to recognize nouns and verbs, suggesting late talkers have difficulties in comprehending, not just producing, words, and this may be especially true of verbs at age 2. However, both late and typical talkers successfully used a known verb to learn a novel noun (e.g., in "You can eat the dax," the "dax" is likely a food), indicating that late talkers' comprehension skills are strong enough to support language-based word-learning.

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Photo by Jeremiah Lawrence on Unsplash

Photo by Jeremiah Lawrence on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Between 10 and 20% of children show delays in producing words and/or sentences around the age of 2, but the nature and cause of this delay vary a lot across children. Our study finds that as a group, late talkers also show comprehension difficulties, especially for verbs, so these children's language skills are not delayed only in word production. On the other hand, late talkers still successfully performed the complex comprehension task of using a known word to infer the meaning of another word. Eventually, we hope that language comprehension measures can play a role in identifying those late talkers who are most likely to experience continuing language delays throughout childhood.

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