Purpose: This study aimed to provide detailed descriptive information about the speech of a heterogeneous cohort of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to explore whether subgroups exist based on this detailed speech data. High rates of delayed and disordered speech in both low-verbal and high-functioning children with ASD have been…

Ohio's public schools provide special education services to children with disabilities as early as preschool. Every year, the Ohio Department of Education reports the number of preschool children who received state-funded special education services during the previous year. The 2016-2017 school year had an overall increase of 1,142 (5.9 percent)…

Purpose: It has been reported that tone language-speaking children with autism demonstrate speech-specific lexical tone processing difficulty, although they have intact or even better-than-normal processing of nonspeech/melodic pitch analogues. In this early efficacy study, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of Auditory-Motor Mapping Training…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; P.L. 108-446) is the primary source of federal funding to states for the identification and education of children with disabilities. The majority of IDEA appropriations are allocated to states by formula to carry out activities under Part B, which covers 14 disability categories. Each state is…

This study used a multiple probe across participants' research design to evaluate the effects of instruction on the acquisition of letter-sound correspondences (LSCs) by three young children with autism spectrum disorder and limited speech. All three children (ages 3-5 years) reached criterion for identifying the LSCs targeted during instruction,…

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…

The Pre-Elementary Education Longitudinal Study (PEELS), which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, is examining the characteristics of children receiving preschool special education, the services they receive, their transitions across educational levels, and their performance over time on assessments of academic and adaptive skills.…

In a sample of 46 children aged 4-7 years with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and intelligible speech, there was no statistical support for the hypothesis of concomitant Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Perceptual and acoustic measures of participants' speech, prosody, and voice were compared with data from 40 typically-developing children, 13…

Evidence to support stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) in speech acquisition is less than robust, calling into question the ability of SSP to reliably establish automatically reinforcing properties of speech and limiting the procedure's clinical utility for increasing vocalizations. We evaluated the effects of a modified SSP procedure on…

Speech-sound disorders are common in preschool-age children, and are characterized by difficulty in the planning and production of speech sounds and their combination into words and sentences. The objective of this study was to review and compare the results of the "Sensory Profile" ([Dunn, 1999]) in children with a specific type of speech-sound…

Special education outcomes were evaluated for 3,608 children (2,513 males) with a preschool history of developmental disability. Sixty-six percent of the children had an identified disability in fourth grade. The percentage of children with a disability at outcome varied across preschool disability categories from 54% to 96%. The consistency of…

The aim was to characterize the panorama of developmental disorders in 208 preschool children with a clinical diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), referred to a specialized centre, the Autism Centre for Young Children (ACYC), for intervention. At the centre, a research team examined all children according to structured protocols and…

"The Condition of Education" is a congressionally mandated report that provides an annual portrait of education in the United States. This document includes information from "The Condition of Education 2009" about children and youth with disabilities. The number and percentage of children and youth receiving special education…

Developmental disorders might differ in their language profiles when using parent reports. The first study indicated that school aged children with ASD have similar language profiles as children with ADHD. Both groups had relatively more difficulties with pragmatics than with structural language aspects. The second study indicated that both…

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…