Developmental kindergarten classroom intervention for spatial relational terms.

Purpose: Relational ability is a key attribute of language. Knowledge of relational terms, including spatial terms, can facilitate development of relational ability. Acquisition of spatial terms can be challenging and necessitates experience and input due to the abstractness of the concepts.

Graduate speech-language pathology students' initial self-perceptions of skills critical for interprofessional practice.

Interprofessional collaborative practice is critical for quality service delivery. Given the limited research on speech-language pathology (SLP) students' interprofessional knowledge and skills, this investigation assessed graduate SLP students' self-perceived interprofessional competence and their perceptions of roles of other professionals. Fifty-eight SLP students completed two validated surveys at the beginning of the first or second semester of graduate school.

Language ability, executive functioning and behaviour in school-age children.

Background: Many children with language impairment present with deficits in other areas, including executive functioning (EF), attention and behaviour. Similarly, many children receiving services for attention or behaviour problems have deficits in language ability.

Aims: To evaluate the relations among EF, language ability and behaviour problems in a sample of school-age children with a wide range of language and behaviour profiles.

Grammatical morphology in school-age children with and without language impairment: a discriminant function analysis.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test Bedore and Leonard's (1998) proposal that a verb morpheme composite may hold promise as a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in English speakers and serve as an accurate basis for the classification of children with and without SLI beyond the preschool level.

Method: The language transcripts of 50 school-age children with SLI (M(age) = 7;9 [years;months]) and 50 age-matched typically developing peers (M(age) = 7;9) were analyzed. Following the Bedore and Leonard (1998) procedure, 3 variables were measured: a finite verb morpheme composite, a noun morpheme composite, and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU(m)).

Lexical and grammatical skills in toddlers on the autism spectrum compared to late talking toddlers.

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25- month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early lexical–grammatical relationships. Findings revealed that semantic categories of words— including psychological state terms—used by toddlers on the autism spectrum were very similar to those of late talkers.

Comprehension of inferences in discourse processing by adolescents with and without language impairment.

Purpose: This study investigated inference construction within spoken narratives in adolescents with varying cognitive and language abilities, using W. Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model as a framework. The role of working memory in inference construction was examined along with language and nonverbal cognition.