Purpose: Understanding students' home literacy environments can help speech-language pathologists, teachers, and other educators partner with families to promote language and literacy learning. This study focused on gaining insight into the views of parents of elementary-age students with intellectual and developmental disabilities who had complex…

Past findings were reviewed with psychometric results and clinical observations of seven children with unusually precocious word-recognition skills and otherwise multiple significant developmental deviations. Implications concerning the syndrome of hyperlexia and how the behavior pattern may disrupt the acquisition of appropriate modalities of…

This study is designed to identify differences in linguistic and communicative performances among preschool-aged autistic children and to learn more about the syndrome of autism by examining patterns of language development, the course of its acquisition, and the context in which it is acquired. Studying the differentiation of skills considered…

This introduction to the special issue summarizes issues raised in the nine subsequent contributed papers, which discuss research findings on communication and language development in persons with mental retardation or developmental disabilities. The paper stresses the direct relevance of the research for prevention, assessment, intervention, and…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of expressive and receptive language levels on initiated and repaired communication acts by prelinguistic children with developmental disabilities. Method: In this descriptive study, participants were 45 children between the ages of 3 and 6 years who had severe delays in expressive communication. Some…

This practicum report describes development, implementation, and evaluation of a program which used an augmentative and alternative communication system with six nonverbal preschool children with developmental disabilities attending a special school. An extensive review of the literature on augmentative and alternative communication systems was…

The last 25 years have witnessed an explosion of research at the intersection of typical language development and child language disorders. A pioneer in bringing these fields of study together is Robin S. Chapman, Emerita, University of Wisconsin. This contributed volume honors her with chapters written by former students and colleagues, who track…