The purpose of this study was to examine the benefits of a treatment approach for adults who stutter that focuses on core communication competencies rather than attempt to modify speech fluency. Eleven adults who stutter completed a 12-week treatment program at The Arthur M. Blank Center for Stuttering Education and Research. Pre- and…

Although language samples are child-friendly and well-suited for obtaining global measures of language production, structured protocols have the potential to elicit many different exemplars of language structures in a shorter amount of time. We created a structured elicitation protocol, the Sentence Diversity Priming Task (SDPT), to efficiently…

This project drew upon evidence in the field of professional learning and development (PLD) in education to create and evaluate a PLD program to foster the use of narrative intervention evidence-based practices by classroom teachers working with students with language and literacy difficulties (LLD) in Grades 3 through 5. The primary aim of the…

This national implementation study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Tier 2 structured literacy teaching set within a multi-tiered system of support. Case-controlled matching was used to determine the impact of the implementation for 1,265 5-year-old children. One comparison group included 1,265 children who were matched to the experimental…

Many adults with Down syndrome (DS) experience difficulty with speech production, and intelligibility challenges and communication breakdowns are common. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention can provide important supports for persons with these complex communication needs but must be customized to address the goals,…

We evaluated the long-term effects of a supplemental, small-group kindergarten vocabulary intervention in fall and spring of first grade and winter of second grade. Participants included students from two studies, an initial efficacy study and a subsequent replication study, identified as at risk for language and learning difficulties, who were…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a virtual intensive reading intervention embedded with mindset training compared with typical reading instruction in a business-as-usual (BAU) condition delivered to fourth-grade students with or at risk for reading disabilities. After screening, the 59 participants were stratified and…

This study investigated literacy learning in students with specific kinds of language challenges at a specific stage of schooling--transition to high school--when the language requirements of the curriculum can be especially challenging. For this exploratory research, a case study approach was adopted that compared 2 adolescent boys both with…

This study employed a multiple baseline, across-participants, single-subject design to investigate the feasibility of an individual, narrative-based, social problem-solving intervention on the social problem-solving, narrative, and theory of mind (ToM) abilities of 3 incarcerated adolescent youth offenders identified as having emotional…

This study was conducted as a follow-up analysis to two prior studies using existing data gathered in those original studies. In the current study, we focus on those preschoolers who received one of two interventions that varied in terms of the level of visual supports for grammatical elements (n = 22 of the original 34 participants). Utilizing…

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an integrated phoneme awareness/speech intervention in comparison to an alternating speech/morphosyntax intervention for specific areas targeted by the different interventions, as well as the extent of indirect gains in nontargeted areas. Method: A total of 30 children with co-occurring…

Profoundly retarded 3-10 year olds (N=24) were divided into three groups: two cognitive training programs--object permanence or means-end--and language only. Results of pre- and posttests revealed that the cognitive training approaches were successful in enabling the majority of Ss to learn to use speech. (CL)

Reviews studies that investigated the effects of emphatic stress on novel word learning by children with normal language and those with specific language impairments. The results indicate that use of emphatic stress on modeled target forms improved the children's lexical learning. Implications for language intervention are discussed. (Author/CR)

This letter reports on a research study in which five students (initially identified as severely mentally retarded and/or autistic) were tested with and without the use of facilitated communication while facilitators were prevented from hearing the test questions. Positive results for four of the students raise issues about accurate educational…

Reviews the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading. Follow-up data from a group of 38 first-grade children who had low letter-sound knowledge in kindergarten found that those who received phonological awareness intervention in kindergarten performed better than their first-grade peers on word recognition and reading decoding…