The purpose of this study was to investigate the speech-associated labiomandibular movement during articulation production in Mandarin-speaking children with spastic quadriplegic (SQ) cerebral palsy (CP). Twelve children with SQ CP (aged 7-11 years) and 12 age-matched healthy children as controls were enrolled for the study. All children underwent…

Purpose: This study focused on whether developmental communication disorders exist in American Sign Language (ASL) and how they might be characterized. ASL studies is an emerging field; educators and clinicians have minimal access to descriptions of communication disorders of the signed modality. Additionally, there are limited resources for…

A recent study by Iverach et al. ("Journal of Communication Disorders," 2010) compared persons who stutter with two normative samples in the context of the five-factor model of personality measured by the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Persons who stutter were characterized by higher "Neuroticism," lower…

Purpose: In communication disorders research, clinical groups are frequently described based on patterns of performance, but researchers often study only a few participants described by many quantitative and qualitative variables. These data are difficult to handle with standard inferential tools (e.g., analysis of variance or factor analysis)…

Background: The dialogical approach of meaning making forms a rich and renewing theoretical perspective to study communication between presymbolic communicators and their interaction partners. The aim of this study is to investigate whether an observation scale based on the dialogical theory, the Scale for Dialogical Meaning Making (S-DMM), has…

In this welcome second edition of "The Effective Teacher's Guide to Autism and Communication Difficulties", best-selling author Michael Farrell addresses how teachers and others can develop provision for students with autism and students that have difficulties with speech, grammar, meaning, use of language and comprehension. Updated and expanded,…

This project examines spoken language comprehension in Broca's aphasia, a non-fluent language disorder acquired subsequent to stroke. Broca's aphasics demonstrate impaired comprehension for complex sentence constructions. To account for this deficit, one current processing theory claims that Broca's patients retain intrinsic linguistic knowledge,…

Purpose: This article focuses on using currently available data to assist speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in making decisions regarding a child's eligibility and considerations for recommended "dosage" of early intervention (EI) services. Method: Literature describing the characteristics of infants and toddlers who are likely recipients of EI…

Research indicates that autism is the extreme end of a continuously distributed trait. The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) and the Social and Communication Disorders Checklist (SCDC) aim to assess autistic traits. The objective of this study was to compare their clinical validity. The SRS showed sensitivities of 0.74 to 0.80 and specificities of…

Cluttering is a rate-based disorder of fluency, the scope of whose diagnostic criteria currently remains unclear. This paper reports preliminary findings from a larger study which aims to determine whether cluttering can be associated with language disturbances as well as motor and rate based ones. Subtests from the Mt Wilga High Level Language…

Research has identified a significant relationship between social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) and speech, language and communication difficulties (SLCD). However, little has been published regarding the levels of knowledge and skill that practitioners working with pupils experiencing SEBD have in this important area, nor how…

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. The 30 chapters have been written by 44 authors from 16 different countries about 112 languages and dialects. The book is designed to translate research into clinical practice. It is divided into…

Purpose: This study was designed to (a) compare the speech fluency of school-age children who do and do not stutter (CWS and CWNS, respectively) within 2 standard diagnostic speaking contexts (conversation and narration) while also controlling for speaking topic, and (b) examine the extent to which children's performance on such discourse tasks is…

Past research with the Communication Attitude Test (CAT) has shown it to be a valid and reliable instrument for assessing speech-associated attitude of children who stutter (CWS). However, in Japan, the CAT has not been used extensively to examine the communication attitude of CWS. The purpose of this study was to determine if a Japanese version…

Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and…