Introduction: Children with CHARGE syndrome often experience significantly delayed motor development, which affects their performance in many motor skills and physical activities. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of physical education provided to children with CHARGE syndrome. There were five main areas of focus: (1) physical…

This study analyzed the quality and quantity of intentional communication in four toddlers with Down Syndrome (DS) and eight subjects matched for either chronological or developmental age. Analysis of Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scale scores indicated that DS subjects expressed different communicative functions and used different…

The authors support the use of manual communication with the non-verbal autistic child and suggest that the exercise of manual communication may facilitate the functioning of spoken communication. Research is reviewed in the following areas: the marked peculiarities in the autistic child's perception of and attention to stimuli within or across…

A study involving five speaking and five non-speaking moderately/severely retarded adults revealed few differences in the ways either group revised or failed to revise their messages. Both groups were highly responsive to listeners' requests for clarification, although they tended to repeat their ambiguous messages rather than revising them. (CL)

The manual examines ways in which nonprofessional group home health care workers can enhance the communication and interaction skills of developmentally disabled clients. The communication process is explored in terms of information exchange, both verbal and nonverbal. Examples of vocal, nonvocal, and echolalic speech are offered and suggestions…

In the debate over continuities versus discontinuities in the emergence of language, sign language is not taken to be the antithesis, but is presented as the antecedent of spoken languages. (Author/HP)

Examines the relation of Pidgin Sign English to American Sign Language and the written English of deaf persons. (AM)

The purposes of the study involving four severely handicapped students (11 to 16 years old) were to examine whether the acquisition of instruction- following behavior is facilitated by the presentation of manual signs with verbal instructions and whether manual and verbal expressive abilities are acquired as an indirect result of receptive…

"Verbal" and "nonverbal" are confused and confusing terms. Gestural phenomena in semiotic use--gSigns--are called nonverbal but work in three major ways, only the first of which is unrelated to the highly encoded (verbal) activity called language. A gSign may: (1) have a general meaning: "yes,""no,""who…

Examined were message-receiving skills of schoolchildren in relation to their mother's messages. Participants were hearing children four, six, and eight years of age and deaf children six to 10 years of age. Findings revealed that mothers achieved high levels of communicative success with their six- and eight-year-old hearing children but…

Ten-minute video recordings of the dyadic interactions between seven deaf children (mean age 5.5 years) and their communication partners (either deaf or hearing) were analyzed. Findings are reported in terms of interaction variables (initiation, continuation, ending, and complexity) and communicative modalities (sign, actions, conventional…

Evaluation of effects of manual signing on toddlers' verbal and nonverbal communicative behaviors in an inclusive preschool found that teacher signing was accompanied by increases in communicative interactions by toddlers with and without disabilities. No reductive effects on communicative verbalizations were observed for either group. (Contains…

This study examined representational matching to sample with 68 subjects with severe mental retardation. Participants differed in their expressive communication and included symbolic (speaking) individuals, distal-gesture users, and contact-gesture users. Contact-gesture users performed significantly more poorly on identical matching to sample…

Linguistics retains from its antecedents, philology and the study of sacred writings, some of their apologetic and theological bias. Thus it has not been able to face squarely the question how linguistic function may have evolved from animal communication. Chimpanzees' use of signs from American Sign Language forces re-examination of language…

Disfluencies in the verbal and signed language of a 10-year-old moderately mentally retarded boy were analyzed. Discussion addresses implications for the accurate characterization of stuttering in manual communication and appropriate approaches to management in such cases. (DB)