Purpose: Despite the clinical utility of sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment in autism, little is known about the extent to which these tasks are sensitive to potential language variation. One promising method is strategic scoring, which has good clinical utility for identifying language impairment in…

Background & Aims: Discourse markers, such as "well" or "like," serve a variety of functions to support conversational reciprocity: filling pauses, aiding word-finding, and modulating turn-taking by holding the conversational floor. Previous research shows that autistic individuals use discourse markers less frequently than…

Background and aims: A substantial minority of autistic individuals score within typical ranges on standard language tests, suggesting that autism does not necessarily affect language acquisition. This idea is reflected in current diagnostic criteria for autism, wherein language impairment is no longer included. However, some work has suggested…

Purpose: As evidenced by perceptual learning studies involving adult listeners and speakers with dysarthria, adaptation to dysarthric speech is driven by signal predictability (speaker property) and a flexible speech perception system (listener property). Here, we extend adaptation investigations to adolescent populations and examine whether adult…

Metacognitive ability supports both self-regulated academic learning and effective social communication. It is critical to adolescents' ability to successfully transition from secondary education to adult contexts, underscoring the need to understand age-related changes beyond childhood. There have been conflicting findings on whether…

Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

To promote children's language development through designs that consider familial contexts, the authors explored the effectiveness of a dialogic reading intervention customized for older siblings in immigrant Latino families. The dialogic reading intervention, developed with components of training, modeling, and coaching, systematically supported…

Purpose: Understanding what is known about the language profiles of children with hearing loss (CHL) is vital so that researchers and teachers can identify the specific complex syntactic structures that CHL may struggle to master. An understanding of which aspects of complex syntax pose difficulties for CHL is necessary to inform the kind of…

Purpose: An important role of social communication assessment is to support intervention planning as adolescents with disabilities transition to workplaces and other adult settings. Adoption of evidence-based assessment practices would align professionals with legal and ethical mandates for schools and other settings. There is, however, limited…

Flexible learning programmes (FLPs) and similar alternative education initiatives are designed to meet the diversity of needs of young people who have become disengaged from mainstream education. There is emerging evidence of the high prevalence of speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) and language disorders amongst students attending…

Autism and psychosis share overlapping clinical features and can occur comorbidly. Given growing recognition that early identification of psychosis risk symptoms may lead to better functional outcomes, the field needs valid tools for use in the assessment of psychosis risk symptoms within autism. This study employed a multi-method approach to…

Purpose: Little is known about the specific nature of language abilities of autistic adolescents and young adults with language impairment (LI), limiting our knowledge of developmental trajectories and ability to develop efficacious speech/language supports. An important first step is establishing proof of concept of identification of LI in this…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

Purpose: Reading and writing are foundational skills that provide access to educational, vocational, and social experiences. However, while the gap widens between the literacy skills of individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and those with typical development as they grow into adolescence, little is known about meeting the comprehensive…

Neurotypical adults often form negative first impressions of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and are less interested in engaging with them socially. In contrast, individuals with autism spectrum disorder actively seek out the company of others who share their diagnosis. It is not clear, however, whether individuals with autism spectrum…