Preschoolers with severe autism and minimal speech were assigned either a discrete trial or a naturalistic language treatment, and parents of all participants also received parent responsiveness training. After 12 weeks, both groups showed comparable improvement in number of spoken words produced, on average. Approximately half the children in…

Purpose: The aims of this article are twofold: (a) to offer a set of recommended measures that can be used for evaluating the efficacy of interventions that target spoken language acquisition as part of treatment research studies or for use in applied settings and (b) to propose and define a common terminology for describing levels of spoken…

Production of grammatical morphemes was examined in free speech samples from 34 4-year-olds with history of slow expressive language development (SELD) and control group. Both the SELD children who had caught up in mean length of utterance by age four and those who had not had acquired fewer grammatical morphemes than controls, though acquisition…

Twenty-one apparently normal children (ages 18 to 34 months) with slow expressive language acquisition were evaluated initially and again at age 3. The late talkers also scored significantly lower in receptive communication and socialization. Followup showed nearly half the group remained delayed in expressive communication and socialization,…

Data on speech, language, performance IQ, school placement, and behavior are presented on 18 subjects diagnosed in childhood as "aphasic" and followed through adolescence. Results revealed slow but steady growth in language with expressive skills showing more rapid progress than comprehension. Performance IQ was highly correlated with language…

This longitudinal study assessed the narrative language development of primary grade children with slow expressive language development (SELD) as toddlers who either had or had not moved into the normal range of expressive language by early school age. Deficits in narrative skills tended to disappear in children with a history of SELD, though…

This study of 44 late-talking and normally speaking toddlers with and without histories of middle ear involvement revealed no differences in expressive language outcome attributed to history of middle ear involvement. There seemed to be intergroup differences in outcome on measures of articulation that were associated with history of middle ear…

Children slow in expressive language development (SELD) at age two and matched normal toddlers were reevaluated at age four. Fifty-seven percent of SELD children showed chronic deficits in expressive syntax and morphology at reevaluation. Children with chronic language delay performed more poorly on narrative skill than their normal language…

A portrait is presented of the toddler with slow expressive language development (SELD), based on research examining the health history; cognitive, communicative, and adaptive skills; behavior; and phonology of 30 toddlers with SELD and 30 nondisabled toddlers. The paper offers a review of research on the outcomes of SELD, and explores…

This study found that the speech of mothers (n=28) of toddlers slow to acquire expressive language tended to differ only in the frequency of use of lexical contingency devices (specifically expansion and extension of child speech), when compared to mothers of normally speaking toddlers. (Author/DB)

Twenty-eight toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates and found to show delayed rather than deviant development in the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

Thirty-six children identified with small expressive vocabularies at age 20-34 months were followed up yearly and tested for expressive language skills in second grade. Of 10 possible predictor variables, only socioeconomic status and early expressive language skills predicted expressive language outcome in second grade with a slight contribution…

The purpose of this study is to provide a microanalysis of differences in adaptive functioning seen between well-matched groups of school-aged children with autism and those diagnosed as having Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, all of whom functioned in the mild to moderate range of intellectual impairment. Findings…

Eighteen people (with ages ranging from 7 to 22 years) who had been diagnosed as aphasic 10 years previously were assessed in terms of current functioning to test the hypothesis that, since the subjects had a specific language disorder, other areas of adaptive development should be relatively spared, and communication scores should be…

This study used several measures to compare 40 toddlers with delays in expressive language and 40 children acquiring language normally. Findings indicated that children with small expressive vocabularies at 2 years of age are not different from their normally speaking peers in terms of hearing, history of ear infections, birth order, or pre- or…