Use of the ADOS for assessing spontaneous expressive language in young children with ASD: a comparison of sampling contexts.

Purpose: The current study compared the spontaneous expressive language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across multiple language sampling contexts: the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, & Risi, 1999) and play with an examiner or parent.

Method: Participants were children with ASD (n = 63; 55 boys) with a mean age of 45 months (SD = 3.94, range = 37-53).

Use of speaker intent and grammatical cues in fast-mapping by adolescents with Down syndrome.

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that action verbs would be harder to fast-map than nouns.

Method: Twenty participants with DS, aged 12-18 years, and 19 TD participants, aged 3-6 years, were matched on syntax comprehension and engaged in 4 fast-mapping tasks.

Sentence comprehension in adolescents with Down syndrome and typically developing children: role of sentence voice, visual context, and auditory-verbal short-term memory.

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with Down syndrome (DS), age 12 to 21 years, and 19 typically developing (TD) children, age 3 to 5 years, matched on syntax comprehension, as measured by TACL-3 Subtests II and III. Of the 5 dependent measures of comprehension, auditory-verbal short-term memory accounted for significant amounts of variance in 4; group membership, 1 (semantic role assignment); and visual short-term memory, 0.