A fundamental deficit in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) is social communicative competence. Atypical prosody in variable forms has been implicated in contributing to this deficit. The purpose of this case study was to describe the clinical management of an eight-year-old child with HFA for whom prosody became the primary target of…

This paper reports findings from part of an evaluation study of the Communication Aids Project (CAP), a government-funded project in England which provided communication aids to school-aged children. The paper focuses on parents' views of the CAP process and the impact of the aid. Fourteen parents were interviewed twice over the telephone: once…

Narrative abilities have been linked to literacy, communicative competence and development of identity. Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) may be at risk for difficulties in the development of narrative skills due to differences in their language learning opportunities and limitations of their AAC systems. The…

This paper highlights the appeal of dynamic assessment (DA) for speech and language therapists (SLTs), and describes the usefulness of various DA models and methods. It describes the background to DA, and the uses to which DA has been put, by educational psychologists in the UK, and by SLTs in the USA. The research and development of methods of DA…

There is a debate about whether the language of children with primary language disorders and normal cognitive levels is qualitatively different from those with language impairments who have low or borderline non-verbal IQ (NVIQ). As children reach adolescence, this distinction may be even harder to ascertain, especially in naturalistic settings.…

This paper describes an approach to teaching grammar which has been designed for school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI). The approach uses shapes, colours and arrows to make the grammatical rules of English explicit. Evidence is presented which supports the use of this approach with older children in the areas of past tense…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily…

This paper explores language intervention for children with specific language impairment in Sweden. The elicitation strategies, style of interaction and language production used by speech and language pathologists (SLPs) were analyzed in two conditions, free conversation and training of grammar. In training, the grammatical targets were used…

This study examined the impact of a training programme which aimed to support language-, literacy- and social-communication-promoting strategies for professionals working with children with language delay. Sixteen teachers, special needs assistants and therapists based in services for children with mild to severe learning difficulties attended…

The correlation between the communicative intent of parents, in terms of their expectation of a response and the response patterns of young children aged 23-25 months during parent-child interactions, was investigated. An Observational Framework was used to code these parameters in interactions between 36 children and their mothers. The children…

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect and phonology on regular past-tense production. Data are presented from a group of 31 children, mean age 33 months, with typical language development. A case study of a 50-month-old child with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is also presented. Children imitated sentence pairs that included an…

The research reported investigated the efficacy of intervention, developed by a speech-language therapist and implemented by a teacher, for the language and phonological awareness (PA) abilities of pre-school, socially disadvantaged children. One study established that children from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds had poorer skills on both…

Among characteristics of children diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (AS) are difficulties in social communication. This study describes the social communicative competence of two middle school children with AS participating in conversations in three different situational contexts. The conversations were transcribed and submitted to three kinds of…

This paper describes the pilot of an interactional training programme designed for speech and language therapists to use with school support assistants, students and parents to enhance their implementation of therapy for children with speech sound difficulties. Collaborative therapy sessions in a school setting were videoed to encourage reflection…

Three groups of children with communication disorders were assessed using the CELF (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals). The results were used to compare the language skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI), autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and a middle group who shared some characteristics of both SLI and ASD (Shared…