The study examined adult-child interactions during conversation with respect to the effects of adult paralinguistic speech variations on the speech production of four four-year-old children. Analysis indicated that each child's response time latency (RTL) was significantly longer when the experimenter's RTL was longer. (Author/DB)

The follow-up study reports data from a population-based series of 23 Swedish children diagnosed in childhood as suffering from infantile autism and other childhood psychoses and followed through to the ages of 16-23 years. Intelligence quotient at diagnosis and communicative speech development before six years were the most important prognostic…

Examines speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, and prepositional phrase. (HOD)

This study of 43 individuals (ages 9 to 26) with autism, autistic-like, or childhood-onset pervasive developmental delay found that the 8 subjects who experienced regression in their language development were perceived as using less well-developed oral communication skills. No relationship was found between a period of regression and the presence…

This review highlights research suggesting that absence of audition precludes talkers from developing typical articulatory organizational strategies and affects their abilities to produce specific speech events. The paper describes the operational model adopted for formulating experimental hypotheses and considers five roles of auditory…

The current state of research into augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems is reviewed, and four dimensions of the study of communication handicap are described: structural, developmental, pragmatic (interaction), and technological. Recommendations regarding standardized research reporting procedures are offered in light of the…

Fifteen mothers read stories aloud to their young children, and analysis indicated that vowels in content words--but not function words--were significantly longer in child-directed than in adult-directed speech. It is suggested that this might contribute to the exclusion of function words during the early stages of English language development.…

This cross-sectional study examined communicative function in children (ages 12-54 months either with profound hearing loss but learning spoken English for communication) or with normal hearing. Data suggested somewhat different patterns of communication function development between the groups. Also, the use of language for social purposes was…

This study investigated developmental patterns of acquisition of the unrounded U.S. English vowels, by following 6 normally developing children from 22 to 30 months of age. Three classes of production errors were identified: intertrial production variability, context-sensitive substitutions, and context-free systematic substitution patterns.…

Investigates differences in the language learning environments of six twin pairs and 12 singleton toddlers (all firstborn) with special reference to pragamatic factors that might be expected to differ in dyadic and triadic interactive situations. (HOD)

Communication in mother-infant dyads and mother-infant-sibling triads was examined to determine how variation in the number of people and type of activity affect the ways language is used by all participants. Homebased observations were made of 16 first- and 16 later-born children when they were between 18 and 23 months old. (Author/BN)

This longitudinal case study follows the development of a woman with autism from mutism at age 10 to acquisition of a range of spoken and written language skills by age 26. Results support hypotheses that both spoken and written language may become feasible forms of communication in such cases, although some skills may plateau or decline.…

Mothers in 22 mother-child dyads read 5 experimental stories aloud to their children and to an adult during which the durations of 7 function-word vowels were measured. Only function-word vowels in the final position (rather than initial or medial) were significantly longer in child-directed rather than adult-directed speech. (Author/DB)

This study found that the speech of mothers (n=28) of toddlers slow to acquire expressive language tended to differ only in the frequency of use of lexical contingency devices (specifically expansion and extension of child speech), when compared to mothers of normally speaking toddlers. (Author/DB)

Eighteen cases of disintegrative psychosis (DP) were compared with 52 cases of infantile autism (IA) with speech loss and 145 IA cases without speech loss. DP cases showed clearer regression after more satisfactory development than the IA cases with speech loss, and by age seven were more severely retarded but similar in autistic symptomatology to…