Purpose: Play is a critical aspect of children's development, and researchers have long argued that symbolic deficits in play may be diagnostic of developmental disabilities. This study examined whether deficits in play emerge as a function of developmental disabilities and whether our perceptions of play are colored by differences in language and…

Recent studies of autism diagnosis in New Zealand have revealed inconsistent implementation of best practice standards in autism assessment and high rates of parental dissatisfaction with the diagnostic process. These findings have arisen despite the development and dissemination of the New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline (the…

Background: Language assessment is a key element of evaluations of children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). The present study examined the validity of a gaze-based receptive language index (RLI) in predicting language test results.Method: Participants included toddlers, pre-school, and school age children and adolescents…

This simultaneous replication single-case design study investigated a vocabulary and main idea intervention with an aspect of text choice provided to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Five middle school students with ASD participated in two instructional groups taught by school-based personnel. Results were initially mixed. These…

This study investigated literacy learning in students with specific kinds of language challenges at a specific stage of schooling--transition to high school--when the language requirements of the curriculum can be especially challenging. For this exploratory research, a case study approach was adopted that compared 2 adolescent boys both with…

Purpose: Impairments in the social use of language are universal in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few standardized measures evaluate communication skills above the level of individual words or sentences. This study evaluated the Expression, Reception, and Recall of Narrative Instrument (ERRNI; Bishop, 2004) to determine its contribution to…

In the current study, we examined the effects of response prompting strategies (i.e., constant time delay, system of least prompts) and frames on sentence writing for three participants, ages 7 to 12, with moderate intellectual disability. We used a concurrent multiple probe across behaviors design to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention…

We compared loss and gain in communication from 1 to 2 years in children later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (n = 41), language impairment (n = 110) and in children with typical language development at 7 years (n = 831). Participants were selected from a prospective population cohort study of child language (the Early Language in…

This study investigated three conversational subskills in children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS, n = 8, ages 7-13) and Williams syndrome (WS, n = 8, ages 6-12). The researchers re-evaluated these subskills after 18 to 24 months and compared them to those of peers with idiopathic intellectual disability (IID) and IID and comorbid…