Our purpose is to highlight the contributions of TalkBank initiatives to improved understanding of clinical impairments in adult and child speakers and examine remaining challenges and proposed solutions. We review the origins and development of TalkBank initiatives that have targeted a wide array of typical and atypical child and adult…

Autistic people who cannot speak risk being underestimated. Their inability to speak, along with other unconventional behaviors and mannerisms, can give rise to limiting assumptions about their capacities, including their capacity to acquire literacy. In this preregistered study, we developed a task to investigate whether autistic adolescents and…

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) commonly results in the inability to produce natural speech, making speech-generating devices (SGDs) important. Historically, synthetic voices generated by SGDs were neither unique, nor age- or dialect-appropriate, which depersonalized SGD use. Voices generated by SGDs can now be customized via voice banking and…

Efforts to implement high-quality communication instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and complex communication needs (CCN) may be difficult for some educators with limited time and resources. In this article, we offer guidance on implementing several economic strategies that can be easily embedded into existing classroom…

Support for school-age children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) usually takes place within the school setting. Successful outcomes for children with SLCN rely on effective collaborative working between speech and language therapists (SLTs), school staff and families. We need to understand the current evidence regarding the…

Purpose: Speech and language disorders can negatively affect preschool children's communicative participation skills. Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six-34 (FOCUS-34) is a valid and reliable scale that evaluates communicative participation in preschool children with speech and language disorders. This study aimed to establish the…

Purpose: For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in schools, outcome measurement is an important element of practice, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our service provision and guiding future decision making, funding, and resource allocation. When selecting outcomes to measure, it is helpful to consider both the level at which…

Children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) may experience barriers to communicative participation. Communicative participation is defined as 'participation in life situations in which knowledge, information, ideas or feelings are exchanged'. Barriers experienced in communicative participation cannot be explained by language competence…

Multilingual children living in areas with low socioeconomic status (SES) are at an increased risk of having speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). Many multilingual children with SLCN in Sweden have insufficient basic vocabulary knowledge in the majority language, preventing them from achieving the school's learning goals. However,…