In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

"School-Age Language Intervention: Evidence-based Practices" explains how to teach the language and literacy skills, strategies, and underlying processes needed for educational success. This book brings together an array of experts to provide the latest practical and evidence-based guidance to school speech-language pathologists.…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

A variety of informal language development assessment tools is presented for use with children with developmental disabilities. This book is written as a manual for clinicians and researchers for evaluating children who cannot meet the cognitive, perceptual, or motor requirements of standardized tests and to help evaluate aspects of language not…

The article examines children's requests for clarification (RQCLs) in sections on the development of RQCL behaviors in normally developing children, the use of RQCL behaviors by language-impaired children, evaluation of language-impaired children's use of RQCL behaviors, and facilitation of language impaired children's use of and response to…

The study compared comprehension of American Sign Language (ASL) between 12 deaf subjects in a program using Signing Exact English (SEE-2) and 14 deaf subjects in a residential program using Signed English, Pidgin Signed English, and ASL. Students exposed to SEE-2 could comprehend ASL as well as residential school peers. (Author/DB)

Many researchers now believe that the representations and processes underlying syntactical development are specific to a "language faculty." If so, reference animacy would not be expected to influence acquisition of linguistic structures such as the passive sentence construction. Specifically, children should be comparably able to…

Two experiments investigated preschoolers' acquisition of spatial words in Mandarin Chinese. In one experiment, 5 groups of 10 children at 34, 39, 46, 52, and 57 months were tested for comprehension and production of 14 pairs of Chinese spatial words. In the comprehension test the children were asked to point to pictures corresponding to the words…

An outline of seven important steps for teaching vocabulary development includes components of language development, visual memory, visual-auditory perception, speeded recall, spelling, reading the word in a sentence, and word comprehension in written context. (JN)

Cognitive and affective responses to one authentic and three edited texts were examined with four levels of university-level learners of Spanish. Results indicated that all students comprehended significantly more from the authentic passage than from the edited ones and also responded more favorably to the authentic passages. (Contains 47…

Some aural activities are described that can help language students with their listening comprehension. They include dictation, a "who am I?" exercise, sketch-drawing, chart completion, a comparison exercise, and a flow diagram. (LB)

Telling and listening to stories is an ancient tradition that can benefit foreign language learners of all ages, languages, and levels of proficiency. Stories contain linguistic, paralinguistic, discourse, and cultural features that provide the comprehensible input and output that students need to develop their conversational skills. Instructors…

Examines the impact of specific language delay (LD) on peer interaction in preschool children. Interaction between three groups of dyads (normals and normals; normals and LD children; and between LD children) were studied. Normal children were more likely to initiate interaction with non-responsive partners and to dominate the interaction.…

Examines children's acquisition of language meaning through their use of homophony, riddles, and other word play. Discusses ways to encourage the study of meaning, using classroom techniques such as finding metaphorical relations among words and phrases, learning word origins, or studying naming strategies of other cultures. (HTH)