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Thirty-seven children 15-25 months of age received clinical diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and were re-evaluated two years later. All subjects were judged to have retained a diagnosis of ASD at the follow-up evaluation. Communication scores for the group as a whole during the first visit were significantly lower than nonverbal IQ. However, by the second visit, verbal and nonverbal scores were no longer significantly different. The group was divided into two subgroups, based on expressive language (EL) outcome at the second visit. The two groups were similar in the second year of life in terms of expressive communication skills and autistic symptoms, except for a trend toward more stereotypic and repetitive behavior in the worse outcome group. By the second visit, however, the groups differed significantly on all standard measures of expression and reception, as well as on autistic symptomotology and nonverbal IQ. When assessed during their second year, children who ended up in the better outcome group showed higher average nonverbal cognitive level, receptive language (RL) scores, number of sounds and words produced, use of symbolic play schemes, and response to joint attention bids. Regression analysis revealed that the variables for which significant differences between the two outcome groups in their second year of life were found provided significant prediction of EL outcome at age four. Stepwise regression identified RL and presence of stereotypic and repetitive at the first visit as significantly associated with EL outcome. Implications of these findings for early identification and intervention are discussed.
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This paper reports a study of the ability to reproduce stress in a nonsense syllable imitation task by adolescent speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), as compared to typically developing (TD) age-mates. Results are reported for both raters' judgments of the subjects' stress production, as well as acoustic measures of pitch range and duration during stressed and unstressed syllable production. Results reveal small but significant differences between speakers with ASD and typical speakers in both perceptual ratings of stress and instrumental measures of duration of syllables. The implications of these findings for understanding prosodic deficits in ASD are discussed. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All fights reserved.
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This study compared the performance of bilingual participants on the English and Spanish versions of the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT). The participants were divided into an early bilingual (EB) group and a late bilingual (LB) group based on age of second-language acquisition. All participants acquired Spanish as their first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Care was taken to ensure that all participants demonstrated at least a "good competence level" for self-rated speaking, understanding, reading, and writing skills in both English and Spanish. Results revealed superior performance on the Spanish HINT versus the English HINT in both quiet and in noise for both groups of participants. Significant differences in performance were noted for the EB versus the LB participants. A number of possible explanations for superior performance in L1 are provided, and implications for educating students in their L2 are discussed.
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This study attempted to elicit distal gestures within dynamic assessment structured sampling events from six children with moderate to severe intellectual disability (ages 8-13). Using four communication temptations and a least-to-most prompting hierarchy across three sessions, three participants who had both pre-symbolic and preintentional communication demonstrated an initial distal gesture, often in response to a choice making temptation. Clinical implications are discussed with regard to the utility of dynamic assessment structured sampling activities. © 2008, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.