Purpose: Elementary-aged peers often need support for them to have positive interactions with classmates with autism who are minimally speaking (i.e., fewer than 30 functional spoken words). This study examined whether peers could learn to use responsive interaction strategies to support inclusive play and communication within a peer network…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to further evaluate an eight-step partner instructional model developed by Kent-Walsh and McNaughton that has been demonstrated to improve implementation quality and fidelity among adults in clinical and educational settings who support the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for…

Purpose: Alternative service delivery approaches are required to provide support for children with communication difficulties in underserved communities. Schools have a unique set of assets that can be utilized to provide this support. This study explored what the education sector and classrooms in the early years of schooling offer as support for…

Purpose: The purpose of this epilogue is to offer five ways speech-language pathologists can positively impact children with dyslexia, drawing from and expanding on the articles presented in this clinical forum on dyslexia.

Purpose: Working with students with emotional behavioral disorders is a challenging area of speech-language pathology practice. In this study, we compare and profile the narrative discourse, structural language, and social communication characteristics of adolescents attending behavioral support and mainstream schools. We also examine…

Purpose: We examined the association between language experience and elementary students' eligibility for special education in Massachusetts. Method: A secondary descriptive data analysis was conducted on the anonymized demographic data obtained from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Third, 4th, and 5th grade…

Purpose: The current study was designed to (a) describe average hourly Language Environment Analysis (LENA) data for preschool-age Spanish--English bilinguals (SEBs) and typically developing monolingual peers and (b) compare LENA data with mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and total number of words (TNW) calculated on a selected sample of…

Purpose: This study examined the vocabulary words and multiword sequences used by 124 typically developing kindergarten and 1st-grade students when they wrote about self-selected topics. The study extends previous research by examining the vocabulary used in different genres. Method: A total of 457 writing samples were analyzed. The samples were…

Purpose: Vocal, gestural, and graphic communication modes were implemented concurrently with a toddler with Angelman syndrome to identify the most efficiently learned communication mode to emphasize in an initial augmentative communication system. Method: Symbols representing preferred objects were introduced in vocal, gestural, and graphic…

Purpose: This study aimed to describe the types and frequency of conversational repairs used by African American (AA) children in relationship to their geographic locations and levels of performance on commonly used speech-language measures. Method: The strategies used to initiate repairs and respond to repair requests were identified in…

Purpose: This study provides preliminary reference data for speech and articulatory rates of school-age children in conversational and narrative speaking contexts. Method: Participants included 36 typically developing children in 3 groups of 12 participants at ages 7, 9, and 11 years. Conversational and narrative speech rates were measured in…

Creative drama and language experiences are described as ways of improving speech and language learning in communication disordered children. (CL)

The director of the Growth and Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development lists issues and research needs in the areas of language acquisition and language development in children, prevention of communicative disorders, and adolescent speech and language. (LH)

Performance of 15 language-impaired children (average age eight years) on a referential communication task requiring verbal encoding of novel referents was compared to performance of normally developing age-mates and language-mates. Subjects used known referent, graphic, and mixed strategies about equally with language-impaired children less…

The reinforcing effects of attention in speech-language remediation with communication problem children are examined. (Author/CL)