We examined categorical speech perception in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Stimuli consisted of synthetic speech tokens in which place of articulation varied from "b" to "d". Children were tested on categorization, categorization in noise, and…

To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are…

This study investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. For the study, we developed a reading test which consists of invented encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. These articles enabled us to test various grammatical structures for their receptive difficulty. This paper discusses…

Background: Although the prevalence of mental illness and behaviour problems is lower in adults with Down syndrome (DS) than in other populations with intellectual disabilities, they do present emotional and relational problems, as well as social integration difficulties. However, studies reporting on specific competences known to be central in…

Despite ample research into the language skills of children with specific reading disorder no studies so far have investigated whether there may be a difference between expressive and receptive language skills in this population. Yet, neuro-anatomical models would predict that children who have specific reading disorder which is not associated…

Guided by Bioecological Systems Theory and Schema Theory, I investigated mothers' perceptions regarding the emotional development of their preschool children. Researchers acknowledge mothers' contributing role in influencing children's behavioral displays of emotion, but there is a dearth in the literature on mothers. emotion-related behaviors,…

The current study characterized stability and changes of autism diagnostic classification with intervention in very young children and examined pre-treatment predictors and post-intervention outcome. Sixty-eight children diagnosed with autism, aged 18-35 months (M = 25.4, SD = 4.0) participated in the study. Children underwent comprehensive…

Research Findings: This study analyzed data from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study (EHSRES) to examine whether the association between family structural characteristics (maternal education, number of parents, employment status, and number of children), parenting practices (sensitive and negative parenting, cognitively stimulating…

In recent years there has been much research interest in looking for behavioural phenotypes (or specific profiles of strengths and weaknesses) that are associated with specific conditions--particularly conditions with genetic origins such as Down syndrome. This kind of information may be very helpful in alerting parents and professionals to the…

Current diagnostic taxonomies (ICD-10, DSM-IV) emphasize normal acquisition of language in Asperger syndrome (AS). Although many linguistic sub-skills may be fairly normal in AS there are also contradictory findings. There are only few studies examining language skills of children with AS in detail. The aim of this study was to study language…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983), on the acquisition and maintenance of reading skills by a six-year-old female with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Cognitive Disorder, and Mixed Receptive Language Disorder. The skills evaluated for…

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that childhood language problems persist into early adulthood. Nevertheless, little is known about how individual and environmental characteristics influence the language growth of individuals identified with speech/language problems. Method: Individual growth curve models were utilised to examine how…

The study participants were 197 deaf or hard-of-hearing students with mild to profound hearing loss who attended general education classes for 2 or more hours per day. We obtained scores on standardized achievement tests of math, reading, and language/writing, and standardized teacher's ratings of academic competence annually, for 5 years,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of four types of language disorders among public school students (N = 152) classified as Emotional Disturbance (ED). We also examined the association of the types of language disorders experienced by these students with specific learning disabilities and clinical levels of specific types of…