Effective written expression is a necessary form of communication and one of the most difficult tasks for students with disabilities to master. Few instructional strategies for writing have been validated specifically for students with emotional and behavior disorders. This single-subject study evaluated the effect of a Direct Instruction program…

Pictures are widely used to elicit expressive language skills, and pictures must be established as parallel before changes in ability can be demonstrated by assessment using pictures prompts. Why parallel prompts are required and what it is necessary to do to ensure that prompts are in fact parallel is not widely known. To date, evidence of…

One way children improve their pronunciation of monosyllabic words is via clarification requests, specifically, the adult saying an incorrect production that differs from the child's incorrect production (Weiner and Ostrowski, 1979). The aim of this study was to investigate children's responses to clarification requests when producing polysyllabic…

This paper examined the fundamental frequency variation in the narratives of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typical controls matched on age, IQ, and verbal abilities. Study 1 found increased fundamental frequency variation in the speech of 21 children and adolescents with HFA when compared to 21 typical controls. Study 2…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined (a) whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) can implicitly compute the probabilities of adjacent sound sequences, (b) if this ability is related to degree of exposure, (c) if it is domain specific or domain general and, (d) if it is related to vocabulary. Method: Children with SLI and…

Teaching grammar in a way that enables students to use grammatical structures correctly in their active use has always been one of the intricate tasks for most practitioners. This study compared the effectiveness of three instructional methods: games, dialogues practiced through role-play, and unfocused tasks for teaching grammar. Forty-eight…

This research investigated the use of a measure of expressive vocabulary to monitor the development of preschoolers learning English. Over 1200 preschoolers whose primary language was Somali, Hmong, Spanish, or English were assessed three times during one year using an Individual Growth and Development Indicator (IGDI) for Picture Naming, a…

Theories of language acquisition have highlighted the importance of adult speakers as active participants in children's language learning. However, in many communities children are reported to be rarely directly engaged by their caregivers. This raises the possibility that children in these communities learn language from observing 3 rd party…

To examine the effects of a digestive enzyme supplement in improving expressive language, behaviour and other symptoms in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial using crossover design over 6 months for 43 children, aged 3-8 years. Outcome measurement tools included monthly Global Behaviour Rating…

Through their study of classroom talk about and around literary text, the authors discovered that their application of Rosenblatt's (1938/1995, 1978) "aesthetic" stance to elementary (primarily Grades 4-6) students' affective responses to literary text uniformly lacked the simultaneous articulation of "the real impact between the…

Teaching children with autism is a challenging task for educators and parents, as the children display marked deficits in language and social behaviors. One of the major goals of an intervention program for children with autism is to provide them a method of functional communication and ample opportunities to practice these skills. For some…

Background: Approximately one-quarter of individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) meet diagnostic criteria for autism; however, it is unclear whether individuals with comorbid FXS and autism are simply more severely affected than their peers with only FXS or whether they have qualitatively different profiles of behavioural impairments. To address…

Purpose: The aims of this article are twofold: (a) to offer a set of recommended measures that can be used for evaluating the efficacy of interventions that target spoken language acquisition as part of treatment research studies or for use in applied settings and (b) to propose and define a common terminology for describing levels of spoken…

This study investigated three questions: Is it realistic to expect age-appropriate spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants (CIs) who received auditory-oral intervention during the preschool years? What characteristics predict successful spoken language development in this population? Are children with CIs more proficient in some…

Pre-linguistic sensory deficits, especially in "temporal" processing, have been implicated in developmental language impairment (LI). However, recent evidence has been equivocal with data suggesting problems in the spectral domain. The present study examined event-related potential (ERP) measures of auditory sensory temporal and spectral…