Background: People with aphasia rely on gesture more than healthy controls to get their message across, but use a limited range of gesture types. Gesture therapy is thus a potential avenue of intervention for people with aphasia. However, currently no gesture assessment evaluates how they use gesture. Such a tool could inform therapy targets and…

Deaf children of hearing parents (DOH) are at risk for early language delays (ELD) due to environmental and etiological factors, compounding the previously reported higher incidence of ELD in deaf children of deaf parents (DOD) compared to the general population. Archival data from the online database of the Visual Communication and Sign Language…

Sotos syndrome is a congenital overgrowth syndrome associated with intellectual disability. This study investigated communicative abilities of children with Sotos syndrome (n = 31), using the Children's Communication Checklist, second edition. A cross-syndrome approach was used to establish the specificity of these abilities. Children with…

When meeting someone at zero acquaintance, we make assumptions about each other that encompass emotional states, personality traits, and even cognitive abilities. Evidence suggests individuals can accurately detect psychopathic personality traits in strangers based on short video clips or photographs of faces. We present an in-depth examination of…

Teaching is a unique and challenging undertaking. Not many can become effective and dedicated teachers. Being a deaf teacher and meeting diverse needs of learners in an inclusive setting also will exacerbate the dilemmas as it calls for multisensory communication and reciprocal interaction with learners. This study focuses on exploring mode of…

Unlike such cognitive impairments as autism and schizophrenia, the speech pattern in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has largely remained underrepresented. We examined the pragmatic competence of OCD-affected individuals under two variant modes: pragmatic recognition and pragmatic production. In the recognition phase, the informants completed…

Parent-child interaction plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. In young typically developing children, direct and indirect relationships between parent gesture, child gesture and child language have been observed. Far less is known about these relationships in atypical language development. The present study investigated parent…

The authors examined whether different measures of print exposure assess the same underlying concept and how these different measures relate to vocabulary breadth and depth. One hundred forty-seven students attending the third year of kindergarten in Jining, China, were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary breadth and depth, and their knowledge of…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…

Babysign classes are increasingly popular across the UK. Benefits are said to include increasing child vocabulary, reducing frustration, and improving parent-child relations. A further relationship between the use of babysign and maternal mind-mindedness (MM) has been suggested. It was hypothesized here that parents choosing babysign classes would…

Evidence suggests that pain interferes with sleep in youth with developmental disabilities. This study examined the relationship between pain and sleep problems in a sample of youth with parent-reported autism spectrum disorder (N = 62). Mothers reported on standardized measures of pain and sleep problems. Youth demonstrated atypically high levels…

In this international collaborative case study, American and Italian authors applied a hypothetical philanthropic case scenario to the recent graduation of the first student with nonverbal autism at the University of Central Italy in order to examine the potential impact a private donation would have on various institutional constituents. A series…

The present study explored the effect of the context in which an imitation act occurs (elicited/spontaneous) and the experimenter's facial expression (neutral or smiling) during the imitation task with young children with autism and typically developing children. The participants were 10 typically developing children and 10 children with autism…

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or "baby sign") on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language…

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs, parent-completed language development checklists) are a helpful tool to assess language in children who are unused to interaction with unfamiliar adults. Generally, CDIs are completed in written form, but in developing country settings parents may have insufficient literacy to complete them alone. We…