The monograph describes a systematic attempt to develop language behavior in a nonverbal autistic 4.5-year-old boy who was essentially unresponsive to environmental stimuli of any kind. The 45-session intervention focused on teaching him to attend, increasing his responsiveness to people, effecting discriminative responses to a variety of…

Five children, aged 7-10 years, exhibiting Developmental Verbal Apraxia (DVA) were evaluated to determine the presence of word-retrieval problems. DVA is a symptom cluster including at least some of 21 potential symptoms, such as delayed speech development and severe articulation disorder. The Boston Naming Test (a picture confrontation naming…

The author reviews studies in which operant training techniques were used to develop and remediate the speech and language skills of vocal imitation, functional speech, generative speech, and generalized speech usage in autistic, severely retarded, echolalic, and other nonverbal Ss. (LC)

Two studies were conducted to test the view that the early reading difficulties experienced by boys result from a "difference" in the way they use language, not their "deficit" in language ability. The first study replicated previous findings that young boys outperform young girls in receptive language ability although they perform less well in…

The importance of human communication is the focus of this guide for improving language habits, which explores both various communication problems and techniques for handling them. Topics discussed are as follows: bad language habits; words as symbols which do not dictate the nature of things in the real world; inaccurate communication which…

Evaluated with 14 dyslexic and 14 normal boys (all 6-12 years old) was the relationship between slow speech-motor encoding to the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory. (Author/DB)

The study involved a comparison of the ability of the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test and the Concrete Objects Test to measure receptive and expressive language skills in 30 trainable mentally retarded children. ( Author/ PHR)

Fifteen 1-year-olds without otitis media were compared to 12 babies who were otitis positive. No significant differences were detected on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development or the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development (SICD) Receptive scale. However, the otitis-positive group exhibited lower SICD Expressive scores than the…

Efficacy of individualized training using a distinctive feature model of therapy was evaluated with 75 hearing-impaired postsecondary students. Significant improvements in vowel, word and sentence production, and word and sentence perception were observed. (Author/DB)

Argues that reading is a system of recoding, not decoding, progressing from a graphic code to an oral code. Maintains that the important aspect of reading lies in obtaining meaning, not in the recoding process. (RW)

This study compared 34 adults who had shown early delays in language (high functioning autism) with 42 similar individuals with no such delays (Asperger Syndrome). No significant differences were found between groups on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), their social outcome ratings or ADI-R scores based on current functioning, or on…

Two experiments investigated the effects of peer modeling on the acquisition of receptive and expressive language responses. Experiment 1 studied lexical learning among five children who were mildly/moderately developmentally disabled. Experiment 2 investigated the observational learning of receptive and expressive language responses by two…