DOI 10.1027/0044-3409.216.3.162 Abstract. Three measures have been found to be predictive of developmental language impairment: nonword repetition, the production of English past tense, and categorical speech perception. Despite this, direct comparisons of these tasks have been limited. The present study explored the associations between these measures and other language and cognitive skills in...

Three age groups were tested for their understanding of present and past tense in the auxiliaries will and did, copula be, and progressive be. Children saw scenarios or pictures and responded to an experimenter’s “show-me” requests based on the tense— non-past or past—of the verb in the request. For two groups (sixty-four 2and sixty-four 3-year-olds), some children also heard temporal adverbs. ...