Purpose: Conceptual and methodological confounds occur when non(sense) word repetition tasks are administered to speakers who do not have the target speech sounds in their phonetic inventories or who habitually misarticulate targeted speech sounds. In this article, the authors (a) describe a nonword repetition task, the Syllable Repetition Task…

Purpose: To propose that the diagnostic category of "expressive language disorder" as distinct from a disorder of both expressive and receptive language might not be accurate. Method: Evidence that casts doubt on a pure form of this disorder is reviewed from several sources, including the literature on genetic findings, theories of language…

We compared the expressive syntax and vocabulary skills of 35 boys with fragile X syndrome and 27 younger typically developing boys who were at similar nonverbal mental levels. During a conversational speech sample, the boys with fragile X syndrome used shorter, less complex utterances and produced fewer different words than did the typically…