This study of Israeli and American preadolescent children examined characteristics of friendship in 44 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD) compared to 38 typically developing children (TYP), as they interacted with a close friend Participants were 8-12 years of age (HFASD: Israel, n = 24; USA, n = 20; TYP: Israel, n =…

Research Findings: This study examined the stability of preschoolers' peer play behavior across the school year and the relations between emotion regulation, receptive vocabulary, and the trajectory of social competence deficits. Participants were 331 preschool children attending Head Start; they were primarily African American and from a low-SES…

Previous researchers have argued that objects associated with a protagonist may be foregrounded, or held active, in memory. This study expanded on previous work by using an inconsistency paradigm to investigate the effects of protagonist association on object accessibility. Readers experienced more processing difficulty when a target sentence…

Reports an experiment designed to throw light on the interference between the reception and production of speech by controlling the level of interference between decoding and encoding, using hesitancy as an indicator of interference. This proved effective in spotting the levels at which interference takes place. (Author/RM)

Evaluation of the ability of 12 hearing children (3-year-olds) to use iconic cues to comprehend signs indicated that resemblance of signs to their referents did not enable subjects to decipher the meaning of most signs. Results were applied to use of adapted assessment instruments with young hearing impaired children. (DB)

Contends that simultaneous speech is not necessary for the recognition of "interruption" by interlocutors. A speaker's "completion right" is validated by how long s/he has been speaking, how often s/he has spoken, the number of "points" s/he has made, and the rights of some speakers to speak about some topics. (SED)

Presents a conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting turn exchange and speaking turns from two perspectives: that of the surface forms of turn taking such as smooth and simultaneous exchanges and that of an empirical analysis of the formal or underlying structure of a turn-taking system. (SED)

Revised methods of scoring the Token Test and Reporter's Test were developed to accommodate specific types of errors committed by language-disordered children during a previous standardization study. Test modifications are explained as are the results of administering the revised tests to both normal and language-disordered school-aged children.…

Eighteen adults with developmental dyslexia were asked to repeat orally what they heard. Analysis of responses revealed an average vowel error rate of 29 percent and an average consonantal error rate of 22 percent, significantly different from those of nondyslexic control groups. Clinical histories suggested genetic transmission of the speech…

Research shows that appropriate gestures, either discrete or continuous, substantially enhance speechreading performance and that inappropriate gestures reduce speechreading performance. (Author/KW)

The study investigated receptive and expressive language skills in 11 preschool gifted children. It was concluded that as a group the gifted Ss did not have a better selection of deep structure and transformation rules than normal Ss. (SB)

The study with 10 agrammatic aphasic (Broca) adults examined their difficulties using determiners in sentence comprehension. Results included the findings that printed rather than spoken presentation yielded significant improvement for the proper noun/common noun distinction, and that performance was poorer for the mass noun/count noun…

The study employed measures of frequency resolution obtained from individual subjects (two normal and three with sensorineural hearing loss) to predict each subject's vowel recognition performance. A relation between impairments of frequency resolution and vowel recognition was found. The described model may be useful in predicting vowel…