This study developed and evaluated a model of good practice linking diagnosis and intervention in young children with autism. Ten toddlers with autism underwent an intervention involving home visits, modeling, workshops and written information with parents as 'therapists' in naturally occurring situations. Within 18 months all children made…

A study analyzed the language development of 200 children at 14, 24, 30, and 42 months and assessed their symbolic play at 14 months. Children from families with dyslexia (n=103) had lower maximum sentence length at 2 years and object naming and inflectional morphology skills at 3.5 years. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Compares and connects the cosmic awareness emerging in the elementary classroom to adolescent cosmic sensibility embedded in the experience of the Hershey Montessori Farm School. Provides examples of students' poetry to support Montessori's concept of valorization of personality as each individual turns toward maturity. (Author/TJQ)

This article considers students' classroom notebooks, their character and their role in learning. The results presented were found within the frame work of a broader international project, the Learners Perspective Study, whose goal is to identify classroom practice from the students' point of view. Two 8th grade classrooms were studied. In each,…

Background: Parents and professionals can both play a role in improving children's expressive language development and a number of alternative models of delivery exist that involve different levels of input by these two groups. However, these alternative treatments have not been subject to rigorous comparative analysis in terms of both cost and…

Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders present with unusual or odd-sounding prosody. Despite this widely noted observation, prosodic ability in autism spectrum disorders is often perceived as an under-researched area. Aims: This review seeks to establish whether there is a prosodic disorder in autism, what generalizations can…

Background: Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. Aims: To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and…

Cross-cultural differences in emotional expressions following disappointment were examined in 59 Chinese American (CA) and 58 European American (EA) children. Children aged four or seven participated in a disappointing gift situation. Dimensions of expressive behaviors following disappointment were coded and included positive, negative, social…

With the implementation of the inclusion concept in public school classes, the ability of the general physical educator to effectively teach all of his or her students has been tested. This is particularly true with some students who have a receptive language disability (e.g., deaf, traumatic brain injury), an expressive language disability (e.g.,…

Background: It is not known whether those with co-morbid fragile X syndrome (FXS) and autism represent a distinct subtype of FXS; whether the especially severe cognitive delays seen in studies of young children with co-morbid FXS and autism compared with those with only FXS continue into adolescence and young adulthood; and whether autism in those…

The present study examined the social significance of changes resulting from teaching symbolic play skills to children with autism using Pivotal Response Training (PRT). Qualitatively obtained results from a previous study indicated that, following symbolic play training, children with autism increased their symbolic play behaviors and play…

Depression-vulnerable college students (with both elevated prior depressive symptoms and low current depressive symptoms) wrote on 3 consecutive days in either an expressive writing or a control condition. As predicted, participants scoring above the median on the suppression scale of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003)…

Children with Down syndrome often display speech-comprehensibility and grammatical deficits beyond what would be predicted based upon general mental age. Historically, speech-comprehensibility has often been treated using traditional articulation therapy and oral-motor training so there may be little or no coordination of grammatical and…

More than ten years have passed since the widely publicized debate about personal and academic writing that played out in the 1990s between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. But the question of the relative merits of these two different types of writing for student writers continues to be an issue of concern for teachers of composition,…

In 118 children followed from age 2 to 5 (59 with autism, 24 with PDD-NOS and 35 with non-spectrum developmental disabilities), age 2 and age 3 scores of non-verbal ability, receptive communication, expressive communication and socialization were compared as predictors of receptive and expressive language at age 5. Non-verbal cognitive ability at…