This study examined longitudinal outcomes of late-talking toddlers. Specifically, we included toddlers who participated in the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) treatment protocol. Our goal was to analyze how many of these late-talking children continued to show signs of risk or impairment in language, speech, phonological awareness, reading, cognitive skills and educational performance. Additionally, we explored what, if any, early indicators (e.g., demographics, SES, response to treatment) predicted these later outcomes and continued showing signs of language impairment. This project is longitudinal in nature, and each wave contains multiple timepoints of data representing measures before, during, and after treatment. Only the first overall wave of data, Vault Treatment Data from Alt et al., 2020; Alt et al., 2021; Alt et al., in 2025 and Mettler et al., 2023, is available at this point in time.
This project is being shared in part thanks to NIH support via grant 3R01DC015642-06A1S1 and the broader NIH TALK (Tackling Acquisition of Language in Kids). The TALK Initiative comes in response to congressional interest in research to support late talking children, and has since grown into an initiative with engagement across five institutes co-led by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and with participation from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
