Background: Language disorder and associated vocabulary difficulties can persist into adolescence, and can impact on long-term life outcomes. Previous reviews have shown that a variety of intervention techniques can successfully enhance students' vocabulary skills; however, none has investigated vocabulary intervention specifically for adolescents…

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…

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…

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…

We reviewed communication intervention studies involving people with Rett syndrome. Systematic searches of five electronic databases, selected journals, and reference lists identified nine studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These studies were evaluated in terms of: (a) participant characteristics, (b) target skills, (c) procedures, (d) main…

A 14-year-old nonverbal severely handicapped boy received instruction in receptive language based on learning a "yes-no" indicator response and a variety of basic concepts. The procedures included scaling of preferences for common objects and basic teaching procedures for a "yes-no" indicator response to the question, "Do you like this?"…

Assessed were the effects of verbal placeholding and full verbal rehearsal (verbalizing aloud the critical components and sequence) on the direction following behavior of 14 institutionalized retarded adolescents (mean IQ 48). A control group from the same institution participated in practice sessions without the verbal rehearsal stress. Pre- and…

This paper discusses the evidence that the specific developmental profile frequently described as being associated with Down syndrome--a profile of communication weaknesses relative to social and daily living skills--can be changed. It is not an inevitable outcome of having Down syndrome. Drawing on data collected to explore the outcomes of fully…