Facilitative linguistic input directly connected to children’s interest and focus of attention has become a recommended component of interventions for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This longitudinal correlational study used two assessment time points and examined the association between parental undemanding topic-continuing talk related to the child’s attentional focus (i....

Because poor comprehension has been associated with small cerebral volume and there is a high comorbidity between developmental dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and specific language impairment, the goal of this study was to determine whether cerebral volume is reduced in dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in general, as some suggest, or whether the ...

We examined reciprocal associations between early maternal language use and children's language and cognitive development in seventy ethnically diverse, low-income families. Mother-child dyads were videotaped when children were aged 2;0 and 3;0. Video transcripts were analyzed for quantity and lexical diversity of maternal and child language. Child cognitive development was assessed at both age...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Individuals with autism spectrum disorders often exhibit atypical language patterns, including delay of speech onset, literal speech interpretation, and poor recognition of social and emotional cues in speech. We acquired functional MR images during an auditory language task to evaluate systematic differences in language-network activation between control and high-functio...

BACKGROUND High levels of behaviour problems are found in children with language impairments, but less is known about the level and nature of language impairment in children with severe behavioural problems. In particular, previous data suggest that at primary age, receptive impairments are more closely related to behaviour problems, whereas expressive language has a closer link at a later age....

Two research hypotheses were tested in the research reported here: The first was that nonlinguistic maternal responses to intentional child communication, but not to preintentional communication, will predict later intentional communication but not later language development. The second hypothesis was that linguistic mapping of intentional communication, but not of preintentional communication,...

Eighty-seven preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders who were initially nonverbal (under 6 words in language sample and under 21 parent-reported words said) were assessed at five time points over 16 months. Statistical models that accounted for the intercorrelation among nine theoretically- and empirically-motivated predictors, as well as two background variables (i.e., cognitive impairment...

Relations between bilingual children’s patterns of conversational code-switching (responding to one language with another), the balance of their dual language input, and their expressive and receptive proficiency in two languages were examined in 115 21⁄2-year-old simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. Children were more likely to code-switch in response to Spanish than English. Ch...