ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a longitudinal investigation of late talkers, with a focus on considering the notion of a language endowment spectrum. In the Early Language Learning Project, language skills of late talkers were compared to those of typically developing toddlers throughout the preschool period. Research on late talkers and investigations of specific language impairment have proceeded, to a certain extent, as separate lines of inquiry even though there are compelling theoretical and clinical reasons to better understand the nature of the relation between these groups. Children were exposed to novel object labels in the context of a puppet game and were then asked to name the objects or identify the objects given the verbal label. As a group, late talkers displayed many similarities to the children with typical language development with respect to patterns of linguistic growth and mechanisms of language learning, though there were also some differences.
