Purpose: Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties in narrative production and comprehension. The present study is a pilot test examining the effects of a storybook-based listening comprehension intervention on the narrative abilities of students with ASD. Method: 16 children with ASD, aged 7-12, participated in 8…

Academic outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain poor, especially in the area of reading, in particular, reading comprehension. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate subcomponent skills of reading comprehension for children with ASD in order to better understand its development and potential…

This study investigates the effects of an integrated oral language and listening comprehension intervention for early elementary students with ASD. Students (n = 43) were randomly assigned to intervention or control comparison conditions, with intervention students receiving instruction in small groups of 3 or 4. Groups were led by special…

Background and aims: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, tele-health has gained popularity for both providing services and delivering assessments to children with disabilities. In this manuscript, we discuss the process of collecting standardized oral language, reading, and writing tele-assessment data with early elementary children with autism spectrum…

Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit social cognitive impairments in the development of theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. ToM has been shown to relate to reading comprehension for children and adolescents with typical development (TD) and with ASD. This study…

Purpose: This study investigates the effects of an integrated oral language and listening comprehension intervention for early elementary students with ASD. Methods: Students (n = 43) were randomly assigned to intervention or control comparison conditions, with intervention students receiving instruction in small groups of 3 or 4. Groups were led…

This study examined the relations between and predictive power of three important subcomponents skills of reading comprehension: decoding, listening comprehension, and reading fluency. Through a series of structural equation models, we examine the relations within a full sample of first grade students at the beginning of the year (N = 290). Next,…

This study of 8-16-year-olds was designed to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension impairments are part of the social communication phenotype for many higher-functioning students with autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). Students with HFASD (n = 81) were compared to those with high attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptomatology…

This study of 8-16-year-olds was designed to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension impairments are part of the social communication phenotype for many higher-functioning students with autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). Students with HFASD (n = 81) were compared to those with high attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptomatology…

With increased demand for improved early childhood education services, it is important to better understand the essential professional development resources that have the greatest impact on both teacher and child outcomes. This study compared the effectiveness of two teacher-training models in bilingual Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Head…

Research Findings: Multitiered instructional frameworks are becoming a recommended approach for enhancing prevention and intervention efforts targeting early literacy and language skills. However, few studies to date have studied the feasibility of tiered oral language interventions before kindergarten; therefore, this pilot study explored the…

Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed three important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the…

This pilot study examined an implementation of a kindergarten summer school reading program in 4 high-poverty urban schools. The program targeted both basic reading skills and oral language development. Students were randomly assigned to a treatment group (n = 25) or a typical practice comparison group (n = 28) within each school; however,…