Children with multiple handicaps, including cerebral palsy (CP), often lose or regress in their functional ability through adolescence and young adulthood. The purpose of this study was to examine functional and psychosocial changes in children, adolescents, and young adults with CP. A retrospective chart review and a prospective telephone…

The objectives of this study were: (1) to examine the psychometric properties of the Assessment of Life Habits (LIFE-H) for children; and (2) to draw a profile of the level of participation among children of 5 to 13 years of age with various impairments. The research team adapted the adult version of the LIFE-H in order to render it more…

This four-chapter monograph, translated from a 1977 Russian book written originally in Russian for Russians, describes methodology and results of the study of cognitive activity in children with cerebral palsy. An initial chapter reviews research on impairments in cognitive activity and speech defects in such children and on methods of…

The adequacy of biting, sucking, swallowing, and chewing as well as the presence or absence of nine infantile oral reflexes were assessed in 60 cerebral palsied individuals (ages 3 to 23). (Author/PHR)

Presents the results of a secondary analysis of the RSA- 911 database from the Rehabilitation Services Administration. All successful vocational rehabilitation (VR) closures for individuals with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy for five data points between 1985 and 1995 were investigated. Trends in the use of competitive employment…

The study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to promote independent walking in a mentally and physically handicapped (cerebral palsied) preschooler involving a collaborative effort between a behavior therapist and a physical therapist in an interdisciplinary setting, a public school. (Author/DB)

A procedure was devised in which message content was provided to four nonvocal, severely palsied quadriplegic adults in advance, and investigators elicited the messages via subjects' yes/no gestures. Results indicated reasonably high correspondence between stimulus messages and messages elicited. (Author/JDD)

Targeted the frequent noncompliant behaviors and negative parent-child interactions each weekday morning in a 12-year-old boy with developmental disabilities and multiple handicaps. "Beat-the-Buzzer" involved setting time limits for the child to get ready for school in the morning and decreasing maternal attention. Data indicated a substantial…

This study compared the perceptions of 20 normal peers of the nonspeech characteristics of 8 dysarthric (with cerebral palsy) and 8 normal-speaking children (ages 6-11). Results indicated that the normal speakers were judged much more positively than the dysarthric speakers. Implications for the mainstreaming of children with dysarthric speech are…

This study used a contrasting word task to evaluate the relationship between specific acoustic features of speech and perceptual judgments of word intelligibility of 16 adults with cerebral palsy-dysarthria. The scaled intelligibility was predicted with 62.6 percent accuracy by acoustic measures related to one consonant contrast and three vowel…

Three Maximum Performance Tasks (Maximum Sound Prolongation, Fundamental Frequency Range, and Maximum Repetition Rate) were administered to 11 children (ages 6-11) with spastic dysarthria resulting from cerebral palsy and 11 controls. Despite intrasubject and intersubject variability in normal and pathological speakers, the tasks were found to be…

This study reports effects of a neurobehavioral intervention approach on motor skills of four children (ages 1 to 3) with cerebral palsy. Children demonstrated generalization of the movement component by using it to perform both a treated exemplar skill and an untreated exemplar skill, indicating that motor skills can be treated concurrently.…

This study examined the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to teach grammar skills to individuals who communicated via augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). A single-subject, multiple probe across behaviors design was used to measure the effect of the instructional program on the acquisition and maintenance of the…

The descriptive study explored the cognitive and linguistic performances of 63 multiply handicapped preschool children (ages 37 to 71 months). Five measures, such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, were used to assess the Ss, who were classified in one of three groups (cerebral palsied, other neurologically impaired, nonneurologically…

Presented are 18 papers on problems in the psychology of mentally retarded children. Seven of the papers are in English, two in French, and nine in Russian. The English papers are concerned with the following topics: peculiarities of psychic functions in oligophrenic (retarded) children with pronounced underdevelopment of frontal lobes of cerebral…