"The Caterpillar" passage was designed to provide a contemporary, easily read, contextual speech sample with specific tasks (e.g., prosodic contrasts, words of increasing length and complexity) targeted to inform the assessment of motor speech disorders. Twenty-two adults, 15 with DYS or AOS and 7 healthy controls (HC), were recorded reading "The Caterpillar" passage to demonstrate its utility in examining motor speech performance.

Analysis of performance across a subset of segmental and prosodic variables illustrated that "The Caterpillar" passage showed promise for extracting individual profiles of impairment that could augment current assessment protocols and inform treatment planning in motor speech disorders.

The author employed in-depth phenomenological interviews with thematic and narrative analyses to yield themes.

Interviewees reported that they adopted language practices perceived to be advantageous to intervention access and wellness. They valued Chinese language but did not pursue its use if it was believed to hinder the children's overall development of English acquisition. All of the mothers believed that bilingualism made learning more challenging. Many believed that it caused confusion or exacerbated disabilities. These deficit views of bilingualism were commonly reinforced by professionals. All of the mothers were motivated to help their children learn English but had no assistance to do so. Practices were sustainable only when they were aligned with families' preferred communication patterns.

There is an urgent need for practitioners to be better informed about issues related to intergenerational language practices in minority-language families. Language use between parents and children is a complex matter that is unique to each family. Parents need to be supported to make language use decisions that are self-enhancing and congruent with their families' needs.

Children with autism ( n = 43), DD ( n = 30), and TD ( n = 36) were recruited at ages 2 to 7 years. Parents provided home videotapes of children in infancy. Staff compiled video samples for 2 age intervals (9–12 and 15–18 months) and coded samples for frequency of social interaction (SI), behavior regulation (BR), and joint attention (JA) gestures.

At 9–12 months, infants with autism were less likely to use JA gestures than infants with DD or TD, and less likely to use BR gestures than infants with TD. At 15–18 months, infants with autism were less likely than infants with DD to use SI or JA gestures, and less likely than infants with TD to use BR, SI, or JA gestures. Among infants able to use gestures, infants with autism used fewer BR gestures than those with TD at 9–12 months, and fewer JA gestures than infants with DD or TD at 15–18 months.

Differences in gesture use in infancy have implications for early autism screening, assessment, and intervention.

The authors used a common set of activities and stimuli to elicit spontaneous speech samples from Head Start students, age 3;0 (years; months). The 119 participants were distributed at a northern (Lansing, MI) and a southern (Baton Rouge, LA) location.

More than 80% of the children at each location met criteria for 10 core competencies. They included sentence length, type, complexity, and morphosyntactic elaborations of sentences at the lexical, phrasal, and clausal levels. The 2 most significant predictors of pass/fail outcomes in a regression analysis were (a) clinical referral status and (b) the number of different words (NDW ₁₀₀) spoken in a speech sample.

A minimal competence core analyses of spontaneous oral language samples may help to identify delayed spoken grammars in African American children.

Parent–child play samples using a standard toy set were digitally captured and coded for child engagement with objects and communication acts and for parent verbal responses to play and communication.

After controlling for parent education, child engagement, and initial language level, only parent directives for language that followed into the child's focus of attention accounted for unique variance in predicting both comprehension and production 1 year later. A series of exploratory analyses revealed that parent comments that followed into the child's focus of attention also accounted for unique variance in later comprehension and production for children who were minimally verbal at the initial time period.

Child developmental level may warrant different types of linguistic input to facilitate language learning. Children with ASD who have minimal linguistic skills may benefit from parent language input that follows into the child's focus of attention. Children with ASD who are verbally fluent may need more advanced language input to facilitate language development.

Maternal language use by 82 mothers with their children was documented during book-sharing interactions within the home in a prospective longitudinal study. The authors analyzed transcripts for maternal language strategies and maternal language productivity.

Analyses indicated variability across mothers in their language use and revealed some stability within mothers, as maternal language use at the 6-month time point significantly predicted later maternal language. Mothers who used more language strategies at the 6-month time point were likely to use more of these language strategies at the 15-month time point, even after accounting for maternal education, family income, maternal language productivity, and children's communicative attempts.

Mothers' language use with their children was highly predictive of later maternal language use, as early as age 6 months. Children's communication also influenced concurrent maternal language productivity. Thus, programs to enhance maternal language use would need to begin in infancy, promoting varied and increased maternal language use and also encouraging children's communication.

The authors used a multiple baseline design across participants and behaviors with 4 speakers with chronic AOS and aphasia. Accuracy of production of trained and untrained words in phrases served as the dependent measure. Participants received 4 permutations of SPT (i.e., intensive–blocked, intensive–random, traditional–blocked, and traditional–random) applied sequentially to different lists of words.

Positive changes in accuracy of articulation were observed for all participants for all phases of treatment. Two participants had a slightly poorer response to the traditional–random application of treatment. However, no clinically meaningful differences were noted among treatment applications when follow-up data were considered.

Findings from this preliminary Phase II investigation suggest that similar outcomes may be achieved with SPT applied with different treatment intensities and different practice schedules. Extending treatment to achieve higher levels of accuracy may have improved maintenance effects, which may have revealed possible differences among conditions. In addition, overlap in methods used for random and blocked practice may have minimized distinctions between these conditions.

Three dynamic language tasks with graduated prompting were presented to 32 typically developing 4-year-olds in the language to which the child had the most exposure (16 Spanish, 16 English). The tasks were a novel word learning task, a semantic task, and a phonological awareness task.

Children's performance was significantly higher on the last 2 items compared with the first 2 items for the semantic and the novel word learning tasks among children who required a prompt on the 1st item. There was no significant difference between the 1st and last items on the phonological awareness task.

Within-task improvements in children's performance for some tasks administered within a brief, graduated prompting framework were observed. Thus, children's responses to graduated prompting may be an indicator of modifiability, depending on the task type and level of difficulty.

This investigation was a follow-up to a recently published study exploring the impact of grammatical language intervention on expressive grammar outcomes for preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Twenty-two 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers received ten 20-minute intervention sessions addressing primary deficits in grammatical morphology. Participants' social and emergent literacy skills were not targeted. Twelve children awaiting intervention, chosen from the same selection pool as intervention participants, served as controls. Blind assessments of social and emergent literacy outcomes were completed at preintervention, immediately postintervention, and 3 months postintervention.

Only intervention participants experienced significant gains in social and emergent literacy outcomes and maintained these gains for 3 months postintervention. Expressive grammar gains was the only single significant predictor of these outcomes.

Expressive grammar intervention was associated with broad impacts on social and emergent literacy outcomes that were maintained beyond the intervention period. Gains in expressive grammar predicted these outcomes. Social and emergent literacy skills were positively affected for preschoolers with SLI during a grammatical language intervention program.

A systematic search of the literature was conducted across 27 electronic databases based on a set of a priori questions, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and search parameters. Studies were appraised for methodological quality and categorized according to intervention technique and outcome (e.g., cognitive-communication impairment or activity limitation/participation restriction). Results were summarized and, when possible, analyzed quantitatively using indicators of treatment effect size.

Forty-three studies met criteria for inclusion in the review. The most commonly used cognitive intervention techniques used were errorless learning, spaced-retrieval training, vanishing cues, or verbal instruction/cueing. Most treatment outcomes were measured at the cognitive-communication impairment level of functioning and were generally positive. However, results should be interpreted cautiously because of methodological limitations across studies.

Research evidence to support the use of cognitive interventions for individuals with dementia is accumulating. Researchers are beginning to evaluate treatment efficacy, yet the focus tends to be on discovery, specifically, refining intervention variables that will facilitate optimal outcomes. Implications for clinical practice and avenues for future research are discussed.

A comprehensive search of the literature using key words related to right hemisphere brain damage and communication treatment was conducted in 27 databases (e.g., PubMed, CINAHL). On the basis of a set of pre-established clinical questions, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and search parameters, studies investigating sentence- or discourse-level treatments were identified and evaluated for methodological quality. Data regarding participant, intervention, and outcome variables were reported.

Only 5 studies were identified, each representing a different sentence- or discourse-level treatment approach and reporting a wide range of prosodic, expressive, receptive, and pragmatic outcomes.

Although the state of the evidence pertaining to right hemisphere communication treatments is at a very preliminary stage, some positive findings were identified to assist speech-language pathologists who are working with individuals with right hemisphere brain damage. Clinical implications and recommendations for future research are explored.