Two studies used sentence-picture matching tests of sentence comprehension in 69 adults with aphasia. Clustering analysis yielded groups of patients whose performance steadily deteriorated and was affected by sentence types that were harder for the overall group. Results provide data relevant to the determinants of the complexity of a sentence in…

The study examined the effects of forward time gating (in which incremented portions of a word are presented) and word length on monosyllabic isolated word-recognition performance with 20 female college undergraduates. Listeners recognized time-gated words less frequently and with less confidence, and word length significantly influenced…

Reports on an experiment designed to identify how contextual information can influence children's performance on an experimental task involving temporal terms. It is concluded that contextual information results in a significant improvement only when such information can be used to satisfy presuppositions. (Author/CB)

Investigation of profoundly deaf adolescent students' ability to read signs in peripheral vision revealed a mean success rate of about 80 percent. Results support the supposition that peripheral vision may be linguistically and communicatively useful for deaf people, particularly as signs in isolation are more difficult to read than signs in…

Analysis of conversations of 15 adults with autism and 17 with developmental receptive language disorders in childhood indicated that the autistic adults showed greater pragmatic impairment because of their greater difficulty in forming context-relevant communicative intentions. Pragmatic impairments arising from failures in translating intentions…

Considers textual aspects of scientific communication and problems for reception presented by the complex dynamics of communicating scientific work. Discusses scientific work based on fraud or misconduct and disputes about the nature of science, and applies reception theory and reader-response criticism to understand variations in readings of the…

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

Assessed representational abilities in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Found group differences in expressive and receptive language based on maternal report and on experimenter assessment, but no differences emerged in child solitary symbolic play or in child- or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play.…

There is limited information available related to the literacy skills of adults with intellectual disabilities. In this project, information was collected about the contexts, current practices, and clients' abilities in literacy in two community-based disability service programs. Individual assessments were undertaken to collect details of the…

This study assessed whether high functioning readers with autism are capable of drawing on prior knowledge during reading. Readers with autism and matched normal readers read ambiguous texts that described well-known historical events. The presence of an informative or noninformative title and primer texts that explicitly described the referenced…

A fundamental deficit in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) is social communicative competence. Atypical prosody in variable forms has been implicated in contributing to this deficit. The purpose of this case study was to describe the clinical management of an eight-year-old child with HFA for whom prosody became the primary target of…

Purpose: To evaluate whether the validity of the Receptive Vocabulary scale of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for Infants (MCDI-I; L. Fenson et al., 1991), a parent-report measure of early vocabulary, could be improved for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by removing items that are biased. Method: Logistic…

The relationship between symbolic play and other domains, such as degree of autistic symptomatology, nonverbal cognitive ability, receptive language, expressive language, and social development, was investigated. The assessment files of 101 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were studied. Nonverbal cognitive ability and expressive language…

This study aimed to investigate the relationships between abilities to initiate and respond to joint attention and symptoms of autism that have, and have not, been theoretically linked to joint attention. Participants were 51 boys and five girls with autistic disorder, aged between 2 years and 6 years 5 months. Measures of joint attention…

We studied expressive and receptive language, oral motor ability, attention, memory, and intelligence in 20 6-year-old children with epilepsy (14 females, six males; mean age 6y 5mo, range 6y-6y 11mo) without learning disability, cerebral palsy (CP), and/or autism, and in 30 reference children without epilepsy (18 females, 12 males; mean age 6y…