Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have native exposure to a sign language such as American Sign Language (ASL) have received almost no scientific attention. This paper reports the first studies on a sample of five native-signing children (four deaf children of deaf parents and one hearing child of deaf parents; ages 4;6 to 7;5)…

In contrast with widely documented deficits of semantic knowledge relating to object concepts and the corresponding nouns in semantic dementia (SD), little is known about action semantics and verb production in SD. The degradation of action semantic knowledge was studied in 5 patients with SD compared with 17 matched control participants in an…

Non-word repetition (NWR) was investigated in adolescents with typical development, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Plus language Impairment (ALI) (n = 17, 13, 16, and mean age 14;4, 15;4, 14;8 respectively). The study evaluated the hypothesis that poor NWR performance in both groups indicates an overlapping language phenotype…

This article reports on a longitudinal case study of consonant productions in one Norwegian girl with Cri du chat syndrome from age 4;6 to age 9;4. It was shown that she had many articulation errors throughout the period of observation. Furthermore, these errors were shown to fall into three main categories: (1) errors of differentiation and…

The study compared five adult stutterers' and five adult nonstutterers' fluent speech patterns produced during one nonshadowed reading and two speech-shadowing conditions (immediate repetition of a heard message). Among results were that stutterers produced fewer speech production errors than nonstutterers during shadowing conditions. (Author/DB)

The pronunciation of stop consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant words by 45 preschool children (15 with speech disorders) was evaluated. In the speech-disordered group, errors in initial position differed from those in final position. Voicing errors occurred most frequently in initial position, and glottal stop realizations in final position.…

Spontaneous utterances from 3 conversational contexts were generated by 3 groups of 10 children, including children with specific language impairments (SLI), and analyzed for accuracy of pronoun usage. Results indicated that children with SLI exhibited more total errors than chronological peers but not more than their language level peers. A…

This study investigated whether cognateness affected verbal-confrontation naming performance in balanced French/English bilingual (N-15 aphasic and 15 nonaphasic) subjects. Results of a picture-naming test showed that cognate pictures were more often correctly named in both languages than were noncognates. Some error types and self-correction…

This study evaluated an experimental articulation testing instrument for differentiating child speakers (N=21, ages 5:0 to 6:6) of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) with atypical and typical phonologies. Significant group differences were observed, suggesting that the measure can differentiate typical and atypical development in this…

Evaluation of the speech of five Dutch-speaking adolescent girls with Down's syndrome found that speech errors tended to be identical to the error patterns in young normal children supporting the view that misarticulations in Down's syndrome subjects are mainly the result of a delay in speech development. (Author/DB)

Changes in consonant and syllable-level error patterns of three children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) were investigated in a 3-year longitudinal study. Spontaneous speech samples were analyzed to assess the accuracy of consonants and syllables. Consonant accuracy was low overall, with most frequent errors on middle- and…

A story format and discourse analysis procedure was used to evaluate the spoken language skills of 20 elementary students with learning disabilities over a 1-year period. Stories from memory were longer and characterized by more as well as different types of errors than were stories from pictures or stories based on games. (Author/DB)