Results of a study involving 14 three- to 11-year-olds with language impairments revealed that, for both functor acquisition and functor recall, speech and sign training was superior to speech training. Type of functor trained was also important, with prepositions faring better than pronouns. (Author/CL)

Sixty minimally verbal autistic children (mean age five years) were exposed to one of four language training conditions: speech alone, sign alone, or simultaneous or alternate presentation of speech and sign. Regardless of training condition, pretreatment verbal imitation ability positively predicted the size of child-initiated spoken vocabulary…