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: Clinicians do not have an evidence base they can use to recommend optimum intervention intensity for preschool children who present with speech sound disorder (SSD). This study examined the effect of dose frequency on phonological performance and the efficacy of the multiple oppositions approach. Method: Fifty-four preschool children with…

The purpose was to evaluate the lexicality of treated stimuli relative to phonological learning by preschool children with functional phonological disorders. Four children were paired in a single-subject alternating treatments design that was overlaid on a multiple baseline across subjects design. Within each pair, one child was taught one sound…

Purpose: To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method: The sample comprised 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36…

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.…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the relation between utterance complexity and utterance position and the tendency to stutter on function words in preschool-age children who stutter (CWS). Two separate studies involving two different groups of participants (Study 1, n = 30; Study 2, n = 30) were conducted. Participants were…

Purpose: To examine treatment outcomes in relation to the complexity of treatment goals for children with speech sound disorders. Method: The clinical implications of dynamic systems theory in contrast with learnability theory are discussed, especially in the context of target selection decisions for children with speech sound disorders. Detailed…

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…

There is a pressing need in Iran for the translation of widely used speech-language assessment tools into Persian. This study reports the interjudge and intrajudge reliability of a Persian translation of the Stuttering Severity Instrument-3 (SSI-3) (Riley, 1994). There was greater than 80% interjudge and intrajudge agreement on scale scores for…

Purpose: Some children with speech sound disorders (SSD) have difficulty with literacy-related skills, particularly phonological awareness (PA). This study investigates the PA skills of preschoolers with SSD by using a regression model to evaluate the degree to which PA can be concurrently predicted by types of speech sound errors. Method:…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the efficacy of a new preschool oral language and early literacy curriculum package ("Teaching Early Literacy and Language" ["TELL"]) for children with developmental speech and/or language impairment (DSLI) either as a primary (e.g., specific to speech and/or language) or…

Purpose: To explore the application of the Activities and Participation component of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health - Children and Youth (ICF-CY, World Health Organization, 2007) as a framework for investigating the perceived impact of speech impairment in childhood. Method: A 32-item questionnaire based on…

Listeners' identification of young children's productions of minimally contrastive words and predictive relationships between accurately identified words and intelligibility scores obtained from a 100-word spontaneous speech sample were determined for 36 children with typically developing speech (TDS) and 36 children with speech sound disorders…

Relatively recently, experimental studies of linguistic processing speed in children who stutter (CWS) have emerged, some of which suggest differences in performance among CWS compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). What is not yet well understood is the extent to which underlying cognitive skills may impact performance on timed tasks of…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to understand the experience of speech impairment (speech sound disorders) in everyday life as described by children with speech impairment and their communication partners. Method: Interviews were undertaken with 13 preschool children with speech impairment (mild to severe) and 21 significant others…