One of the earliest indicators of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is delay in language and social communication. Despite consensus on the benefits of earlier diagnosis and intervention, our understanding of the language growth of children with ASD during the first years of life remains limited. Therefore, this study compared communication growth…

Programs serving infants and toddlers are expected to use child data to inform decisions about intervention services; however, few tools exist to support these efforts. The Making Online Decisions (MOD) system is an adaptive intervention that guides early educators' data-based intervention decision making for infants and toddlers at risk for…

Both naturalistic communication and parent-implemented interventions are evidence-based practices for young children with disabilities, but demonstrations of effective methods for teaching parents to implement naturalistic interventions successfully with their children are still warranted. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a…

This study examined the effects of an adapted alternating treatments design (AATD) consisting of teacher-facilitated and iPad-facilitated instruction on at-risk preschool children's vocabulary. Instruction was provided on 42 verbs, divided equally between treatments, across five participants over the course of 7 weeks. Dependent variables included…

Many early childhood educators struggle to meet the communication needs of children with delays and disabilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the functional relation between bug-in-ear coaching and the frequency of educators' correct use of targeted communication strategies, as well as associations with children's expressive…

A randomized control intervention study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the highly structured Heidelberg Parent-Based Language Intervention (HPLI). The outcomes of 43 children (n = 23 intervention, n = 20 control) who had been identified as late talkers during routine developmental check-ups carried out in pediatric practices at the age…

The effects of a parent-coached language intervention on parent stress and its relation to parent perceptions of communication development were examined in 60 parents of toddlers with developmental delays. Results indicated that overall parent stress was not high prior to or following language intervention. Parents' perceptions about the severity…

Longitudinal data on the unstructured interactions at home of nine children (ages 11-60 months) with Down syndrome were used to compare individual differences in initial expressive vocabulary growth to data on 42 children without disabilities. Findings indicate that the overall pattern of vocabulary growth was similar in all the children.…

A home-based interventionist effectively taught four mothers to embed the mand-model procedure in daily activities to teach expressive language skills to their young children with speech delays. During the intervention phase, parents were provided with feedback along with specific encouragement to use the individualized instructional program…

This purpose of this randomized group experiment was (a) to test the post-treatment (i.e., immediately after treatment) and follow-up (i.e., 8 months after the end of treatment) efficacy of a treatment designed to facilitate both sentence length and speech intelligibility (i.e., broad target recast), and (b) to explore whether pretreatment speech…