A fundamental deficit in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) is social communicative competence. Atypical prosody in variable forms has been implicated in contributing to this deficit. The purpose of this case study was to describe the clinical management of an eight-year-old child with HFA for whom prosody became the primary target of…

Purpose: To evaluate whether the validity of the Receptive Vocabulary scale of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for Infants (MCDI-I; L. Fenson et al., 1991), a parent-report measure of early vocabulary, could be improved for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by removing items that are biased. Method: Logistic…

The relationship between symbolic play and other domains, such as degree of autistic symptomatology, nonverbal cognitive ability, receptive language, expressive language, and social development, was investigated. The assessment files of 101 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were studied. Nonverbal cognitive ability and expressive language…

This study aimed to investigate the relationships between abilities to initiate and respond to joint attention and symptoms of autism that have, and have not, been theoretically linked to joint attention. Participants were 51 boys and five girls with autistic disorder, aged between 2 years and 6 years 5 months. Measures of joint attention…

Two studies examined the ability of 22 deaf high school students to instantiate (select appropriate word meaning from context) particular exemplars of general nouns and to use those instantiations as retrieval cues. Among results were that subjects could instantiate when asked to do so but did not do so spontaneously. (Author/DB)

Studies two groups of autistic children--good versus poor verbal imitators--within the context of a receptive label acquisition task. Both groups acquired receptive signs. However, good imitators acquired receptive speech whereas poor imitators typically did not. (Author/AS)

Based on a neurolinguistic model of naming, naming and reading tests were administered to a longitudinal sample of 115 kindergarteners before, during, and after reading acquisition. Preliminary trends indicate that poor readers are significantly different from average readers on all naming tests except those emphasizing receptive vocabulary…

The acquisition of language-receptive processes in preschool children was studied using a word association task. (ST)

Although 12 preadolescents who had been diagnosed as language impaired during preschool performed as well as a control group on certain tests involving literal aspects of language and on a nonverbal intelligence test, they were deficient in understanding metaphoric sentences and in performing the cognitive task. (Author/CL)

This study investigated whether shared parent-infant book reading at 4 and 8 months would be associated with subsequent language abilities at 12 and 16 months. Parents of 87 typically developing middle-class infants reported on the presence or absence of shared reading in the home; infant language abilities were measured through laboratory…

Shift of the cortical mechanisms of language from the usually dominant left to the non-dominant right hemisphere has been demonstrated in the presence of large brain lesions. Here, we report a similar phenomenon in a patient with a cavernoma over the anterolateral superior temporal gyrus associated with epilepsy. Language mapping was performed by…

The present study included observational and self-report measures to examine associations among parental stress, parental behaviour, child behaviour, and children's theory of mind and emotion understanding. Eighty-three parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated. Parents completed measures of parental stress, parenting (laxness,…

We studied expressive and receptive language, oral motor ability, attention, memory, and intelligence in 20 6-year-old children with epilepsy (14 females, six males; mean age 6y 5mo, range 6y-6y 11mo) without learning disability, cerebral palsy (CP), and/or autism, and in 30 reference children without epilepsy (18 females, 12 males; mean age 6y…

The relation between theory of mind and affective perspective taking was examined in a study with 42 three- to five-year-olds. Children completed tasks measuring affective perspective taking, theory of mind, and receptive language abilities. Significant positive correlations existed between overall affective perspective taking and theory of mind…