Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, that is, it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive…

Language abilities in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are variable and can be challenging to ascertain with confidence. This study aimed to compare and evaluate different forms of language assessment: standardized language testing, narrative analysis and parent/teacher reports. 14 adolescents with ASD and 14 typically developing…

This article reports a meta-analysis of 42 experiments in 33 published studies involving processing instruction (PI) and production-based instruction (PB) used in the PI studies. The comparative effectiveness of PI and PB showed that although PI was more effective than PB for developing receptive knowledge, PB was just as effective as PI for…

Background: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a disharmonic linguistic profile with a clear pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Despite their sociable nature, atypical socio-communicative abilities and deficits in communication and relationship with others have been found. Aim: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether…

Young people from areas of socioeconomic disadvantage (SED) are more likely to present with language difficulties, particularly vocabulary difficulties. Studies have shown the effectiveness of vocabulary interventions for children with language impairment but not for adolescents from areas of SED. This article aims to establish the effectiveness…

Background: Evidence of the effectiveness of therapy for older children with (developmental) language disorder (DLD), and particularly those with receptive language impairments, is very limited. The few existing studies have focused on particular target areas, but none has looked at a whole area of a service. Aims: To establish whether for…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…

This study aimed to discover whether general receptive vocabulary is qualitatively phenotypical in Down syndrome. Sixty-two participants with Down syndrome (M age = 16.74 years, SD = 3.28) were individually matched on general vocabulary raw total score with 62 participants with intellectual disability of undifferentiated etiology (M age = 16.20…

Background: It is recognized that children from areas associated with socioeconomic disadvantage are at an increased risk of delayed language development. However, so far research has focused mainly on young children and there has been little investigation into language development in adolescence. Aims: To investigate the language abilities of…

Background: This study investigates the use of requests for clarification in conversations between teenagers with a cochlear implant (CI) and hearing peers. So far very few studies have focused on conversational abilities in children with CI. Aims: The aim was to explore co-construction of dialogue in a referential communication task and the…

This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of a group of deaf adolescents and how these skills correlated with decoding skills (single word and non-word reading) and receptive vocabulary. Twenty, congenitally profoundly deaf adolescents with at least average nonverbal cognitive skills were tested on a range of phonological awareness…

Objective: As a follow-up to an earlier cross-sectional study (Holmbeck et al., 2003), the current multimethod, multi-informant investigation examined individual growth in psychosocial adjustment across the adolescent transition in 2 samples: young adolescents with spina bifida (SB) and typically developing adolescents (N = 68 in both groups at…

The comparison of cognitive and linguistic skills in individuals with developmental disorders is fraught with methodological and psychometric difficulties. In this paper, we illustrate some of these issues by comparing the receptive vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal reasoning abilities of 41 children with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder in…

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

This study examines the receptive skills of severely deaf subjects employing either oral or total modes of communication in the comprehension of a wide range of syntactical and semantic structures. For almost all types of structures investigated, the total system was found to be the more effective method of communication. (Author/SJL)