Background: Unusual responses to sensory stimuli are seen in many children with autism. Their presence was highlighted both in early accounts of autism and in more recent first-person descriptions. There is a widespread belief that sensory symptoms characterize autism and differentiate it from other disorders. This paper examines the empirical…

Research tells us that children with developmental disabilities and delays have reduced social interaction and reduced social acceptance by other children in comparison with their same-aged peers within early childhood settings. The consequence of this is that these children have limited access to the possible developmental opportunities within…

This chapter presents the findings from a network analysis of a demonstration program for the developmentally disabled to show the application of graphical network analysis in program evaluation. The developmentally disabled demonstration (DDD) program was a five-year pilot project to provide person-centered service environments to people with …

As a result of inherent cognitive and language difficulties, individuals with mental retardation/developmental disabilities often are considered difficult to assess appropriately. When cognitive and language difficulties occur in conjunction with behavioral issues, this difficulty is compounded. The IDEA requirement to include a form of…

A growing number of community childcare programs are including children with developmental disabilities. While some studies have explored the effects of inclusion for preschool and school-age children without disabilities, there is little knowledge about inclusion for typically developing toddlers enrolled in such programs or about parent…

There have been growing reports of older women and men caring for their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Many of these grandparents are caring for children with developmental disabilities. To systematically examine the effectiveness of a support group intervention for such grandparents, we recruited 97 grandparents through three agencies in…

Wilkinson and Green (1998) reported that differences in the procedure by which new words were introduced to learners with cognitive impairments significantly affected their accuracy in later tests of receptive understanding of word meanings. However, a limited sample and no control group rendered the data preliminary. Here, I replicated and…

Communication skills are important for children with developmental disabilities to be functional and independent in their own lives. This study examined influences of different types of listener feedback or breakdowns on repair behaviors of nonverbal children with disabilities during semi-structured opportunities at snack time. Three preschool…

The study investigated the role of social reinforcement, when teaching two preschoolers with no functional vocal verbal behavior first instances of echoic responses, using rapid motor imitation responding. The dependent variables for the experiment were: (1) echoic tacts (echoics presented under the controlling variables of tacts) and (2)…

The birth of a child with Down syndrome has the "potential" to have many effects upon the family. Conversely, the way in which individual family members and the family as a whole respond to this situation has the capacity to have a profound impact on the child's development. This "bidirectional" process, in which the child's behavior affects the…

The aim of the study was to examine factors that predict maternal stress, reported by mothers whose infants were diagnosed as having developmental disabilities at the beginning of participating in an early intervention programme "Me and My Mommy" and after one year. A second goal was to identify and to portray a subgroup of resilient…

The Questions About Behavioral Function (QABF), a 25-item rating scale, was developed to identify the function(s) of maladaptive behavior in individuals with developmental disabilities. The authors adapted it for use with individuals with serious mental illness who engage in maladaptive behavior and assessed the psychometric characteristics of the…

Background: Developmental dyslexia is typically defined by deficits in phonological skills, but it is also associated with anomalous performance on measures of balance. Although balance assessments are included in several screening batteries for dyslexia, the association between impairments in literacy and deficits in postural stability could be…

The purposes of this study were to examine the variables related to the special education students' stereotyped behavior in Taiwan, to understand types and functions of these students' stereotyped behavior, and to investigate the impact of such stereotypy on teaching in special educational classrooms. Questionnaires were sent to 308 classroom…

Background: Though the Down syndrome behavioural phenotype has been described as involving relative strengths in visuo-spatial processing and sociability, and relative weaknesses in verbal skills and motor planning, the early emergence of this phenotypic pattern of strengths and weaknesses has not yet been fully explored. Method: In this study, we…