This study documents the communication strengths of 14 adults who resided in community group-home settings through the use of staff informant reports. These participants had as many as 12 different communication forms (e.g., reaching gestures, body orientation, facial expression, leading gestures, eye gaze, vocalizations) and 11 different…

From the perspective of years in the classroom, Jago shares her journey of reflective teaching that led to a strong belief that all students need the "language of literature" incorporated into daily instruction. Having the vocabulary of intellectual thought at their disposal helps students think through complex issues and express their questions…

The knowledge of letter names measured just before children enter school has been known for a long time as one of the best longitudinal predictors of learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. After a period during which the comprehensive investigation of this relationship was largely disregarded, there is now a growing interest in attempts…

The current experiment investigated how sentential form-class expectancies influenced lexical-semantic priming within each hemisphere. Sentences were presented that led readers to expect a noun or a verb and the sentence-final target word was presented to one visual field/hemisphere for a lexical decision response. Noun and verb targets in the…

Background: Despite recent interest in relationships between maternal gesture and speech and communicative development in typically developing (TD) children, little work has examined either speech or gesture in mothers of children with Down's syndrome (DS). Aims: To compare aspects of speech and gesture production by mothers of children with DS…

Examines whether manually coded English (MCE) sign language systems are learnable. Reading achievement and expressive English skills of deaf students educated using only a MCE sign system were examined. Deaf students had expressive English skills comparable to hearing students in respect to syntactical and lexical skills but were deficient in…

Few studies have examined the ability of individuals with learning disabilities, in general, or with Down syndrome, specifically, to discriminate speech. The purpose of this study was compare the speech discrimination abilities of eight children with Down syndrome (aged 5.7 to 12.8 years) to seven nonverbal mental-age matched controls (aged 4.0 to…

Characterizing early communicative development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is valuable for understanding profiles of ability in this population. The current investigation was modeled on Charman, Drew, Baird & Baird (2003b). Analyses explored parent report of early vocabulary, non-verbal communication, functional object use and…

This longitudinal project identified young children at risk of literacy difficulties and asked why some of these children fail to benefit from phonologically based intervention. Reception class children were screened to identify a group at risk of literacy difficulties and a matched group of children not at risk. Profiles were compiled for each…

Successful community-university partnerships are usually attributed, at least in part, to clear communication processes. This chapter reflects on language and context as elements in developing a strong partnership process.

The teaching of highly valued scientific writing skills in the first year of university is challenging. This report describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel written assignment, "The Personal Response" and accompanying Peer Review, in the course, Human Biology (BIOL1015) at The University of Queensland. These assignments were…

Studies are needed to better understand the broad autism phenotype in young siblings of children with autism. Cognitive, adaptive, social, imitation, play, and language abilities were examined in 42 non-autistic siblings and 20 toddlers with no family history of autism, ages 18-27 months. Siblings, as a group, were below average in expressive…

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and…

Background: Children with specific language impairment experience story comprehension deficits. Research with typically developing children, poor comprehenders and poor readers has shown that the use of mental imagery aids in the comprehension of stories. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program in the use of mental imagery…

Researchers and educators have developed an interest in language development. Their studies focused on the cultural context in which language is learned and developed and its relationship to cognitive development. This article reviews the researchers' definitions on oracy and its social facets of language learning. Specifically, it reviews studies…