Background and aims: Nongenerative speech is the rote repetition of words or phrases heard from others or oneself. The most common manifestations of nongenerative speech are immediate and delayed echolalia, which are a well-attested clinical feature and a salient aspect of atypical language use in autism. However, there are no current estimates of…

Background & aims: Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and…

In many autistic children, speech onset is delayed and expressive language emerges after 3 years of age. We qualitatively and quantitatively describe oral productions of autistic preschoolers, including many non- or minimally speaking, recorded during interactions with a caregiver and with an experimenter. Data clustering on manually coded oral…

Purpose: We aimed to compare the speech of parents and examiners as they elicited language samples from minimally and low-verbal (MLV) children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while following the same semi-structured elicitation protocol, Eliciting Language Samples for Analysis-Adolescents (ELSA-A). We also compared the speech…

Background: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Down syndrome (DS) are the two leading genetic causes of intellectual disability, and FXS is the most common known genetic condition associated with autism. Both FXS and DS are associated with significant language impairment, but little is known about expressive language across domains over time or the role…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of peer intervention on the social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this model, a speech-language pathologist and three early childhood educators trained typically developing peers to engage children with ASD in play. Three preschool children with ASD and six…