Deferred imitation and early social communication skills were compared among speaking and nonspeaking children with autism and children developing typically. Overall, the children with autism showed a lower frequency on measures of deferred imitation and social communication compared with typically developing children. Deferred imitation was…

Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and…

This study compares use of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) and a Voice Output Communication Aide (VOCA) with four preschool children who were either non-speaking or limited in their ability to speak and did not use an AAC system to communicate functionally. An alternating treatment single subject design was used to measure…

Children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common known inherited cause of intellectual disability, typically experience communication difficulties. Children with other intellectual disabilities such as Down syndrome also experience communication difficulties. Further, many boys with FXS (some estimates are as high as 35 percent) also are…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Purpose: To examine reductions in performance on auditory tasks by aphasic and neurologically intact individuals as a result of concomitant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner noise. Method: Four tasks together forming a continuum of linguistic complexity were developed. They included complex-tone pitch discrimination, same-different…

Background: Semantic and inferencing abilities have not been fully examined in children with communication difficulties. Aims: To investigate the inferential and semantic abilities of children with communication difficulties using newly designed tasks. Methods & Procedures: Children with different types of communication disorder were compared with…

Evaluation of client progress is an important topic in communicative disorders research and clinical literature. Goal attainment scaling (GAS) is a technique for evaluating individual progress toward goals. Despite recognition of GAS as a clinical-outcome assessment technique in other clinical professions, the current debate on measuring client…

A longitudinal study was conducted on 34 children with autism to evaluate the usefulness of the Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication Handicapped Children (TEACCH) program for Chinese pre-school children in Hong Kong. Eighteen children received full-time center-based TEACCH program training. The control group included 16…

Communication breakdowns occurring in the speech of seven language learning-disabled children (aged 9-11) were examined in conversation and narration and compared to normal peers. Length of communication unit and rate of communication breakdowns per communication unit were greater in narration than conversation compared to controls. No differences…

Ten head-injured adults were compared to normal adults on a narrative picture description task. Subjects were similar in amount of pertinent content expressed, narrative length, and rate of speech, but were significantly slower in rate of information imparted as they required lengthier and slower verbal outputs to convey essential information.…

Three groups of children with communication disorders were assessed using the CELF (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals). The results were used to compare the language skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI), autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and a middle group who shared some characteristics of both SLI and ASD (Shared…

The influence of disabilities on placement outcomes was examined for 277 children who were removed from their biological parents due to substantiated maltreatment. Results indicated that children with a disability were less likely to reunify and more likely to reside in non-kin foster care two years later than typical children. Children with…

For many of the children who are blind and who also display features of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) it is possible that their characteristics, while being representative of ASD, actually follow a different pathway to those children who have ASD and are sighted. It is proposed that these children should be viewed as having specific features…