Children adopted from abroad at older ages have unique speech and language-learning issues. At adoption, the impact of longer stays in orphanages with their associated lack of enrichment, nutrition, and healthcare is more pronounced. After adoption, the children begin school in a new language soon after arriving home. These children quickly lose…

Growing evidence suggests that, as a group, many internationally adopted children catch up to their peers in terms of their language development by the time they reach their school-age years. Although this appears to be particularly true for children adopted during the first few years of life, it is not true for all internationally adopted…

Many studies reveal effects of verb type on verb retrieval, mainly in agrammatic aphasic speakers. In the current study, two factors that might play a role in action naming in anomic aphasic speakers were considered: the conceptual factor instrumentality and the lexical factor name relation to a noun. Instrumental verbs were shown to be better…

Background: The aim of this study was to explore the views of hospital and disability service staff on the roles and needs of family carers of adults with cerebral palsy (CP) and complex communication needs (CCN) in hospital. Method: We conducted a focus group with six hospital and disability service staff, analysed the content themes of the group…

There is little research on inclusion of children with selective mutism in school/kindergarten. Moreover, few studies have tried to understand selectively mute children's interactions in the natural surroundings of their home and school/kindergarten. Five children meeting the DSM-IV criteria for selective mutism were video-observed in social…

Although sharing many of the identified difficulties associated with autism, Asperger's syndrome (AS) is widely believed to differ in the domain of linguistic deficit. While researchers may disagree in detail about the language and communication performance of pupils with Asperger's syndrome, there seems to be general consensus that such…

Background: Listening to how people talk about the consequences of acquired aphasia helps one gain insight into how people construe disability and communication disability in particular. It has been found that some of these construals can be more of a disabling barrier in re-engaging with life than the communication impairment itself. Aims: To…

This study attempted to elicit distal gestures within dynamic assessment structured sampling events from six children with moderate to severe intellectual disability (ages 8-13). Using four communication temptations and a least-to-most prompting hierarchy across three sessions, three participants who had both pre-symbolic and preintentional…

Background: Nasometry has supplemented perceptual assessments of nasality, using speech stimuli, which are devoid of nasal consonants. However, such speech stimuli are not representative of conversational speech. A weak relationship has been found in previous studies between perceptual ratings of hypernasality and nasalance scores for passages…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

The effectiveness of a unique model of in-service training involving U.S. teacher educators and school teachers from Belize, Central America, is described based upon findings from a consecutive three-year period of the project. An evaluation component was integrated to provide a structure for program improvement, in which formative and summative…

Three children diagnosed within the autism spectrum between the ages of 5 and 7 years at different stages of communication development were supplied with speech-generating devices (SGDs) in their homes. The parents were taught to introduce the SGDs into home routines and the effects were evaluated naturalistically. Videotapes recorded by the…

Purpose: In this study, the author examined the following questions: What proportion of adult persons who stutter (PWS) choose fluency and what proportion choose to be free from a need to be fluent in managing their stuttering? What demographic and stuttering-related variables influence their choice, and how consistent are they in their choice?…

When Candi Carter, a producer at "The Oprah Winfrey Show", learned that her son, Emerson, was born with chromosome 8p, which causes heart defects, mental retardation, severe speech delay, and other issues, she was immediately thrust into the world of special needs parenting. Like many in her position, she learned quickly that her child's…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…