The home literacy environment of school-age autistic children with high support needs.

Background: As a group, autistic children with high support needs (with adaptive functioning in the range of an intellectual disability) are at risk of significant literacy difficulties. We investigated the parent-reported home literacy environment of this group of children.

Method: Sixty-two parents of autistic children (4.

Examining Adolescent Language Performance in Discourse Production Across Four Elicitation Tasks.

Purpose: Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks.

Profiles and Longitudinal Growth Trajectories of Teacher-Rated Academic Skills and Enablers in Autistic Children and Adolescents.

In non-autistic children, academic skills are associated with academic enablers (motivation, engagement, study/interpersonal skills), but few studies have explored these in autistic children. This study identified profiles of academic skills and enablers in autistic students and explored the trajectory of each profile over time. Teachers completed the Academic Competences Evaluation Scales for autistic children in primary and secondary educational settings annually for 5 years.

Correction: Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children.

Background: The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children's personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important.

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children's narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper.

Feasibility of Using the Global Tales Protocol to Elicit Personal Narratives in 10-year-Old Children in Ireland.

Introduction: This small-scale study explored the feasibility of the Global TALES protocol in eliciting personal narratives in typically developing monolingual Irish children, using the online Zoom platform. We investigated children's performance on measures of productivity (total number of utterances; total number of words) and syntactic complexity (MLU in words). We also documented the topics children talked about in response to the six emotion-based prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol.

Children's Use of Evaluative Devices in Response to the Global TALES Protocol.

Introduction: It has been well established that the function of sharing personal narratives is to inform the listener about what the event meant to the narrator, for example, by using a range of evaluative devices. The use of these evaluative devices may reflect a person's understanding of the differences between one's own mind and others, by expressing their beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and desires. This paper investigates children's use of evaluative devices when producing personal narratives in response to the six emotion-based prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important).

Pre-school Skills and School-Age Reading Comprehension in Children on the Autism Spectrum: A Preliminary Investigation.

We explored reading comprehension development in children on the spectrum from pre-school to the first (YOS1) and third year of schooling (YOS3). Children were first assessed on meaning-related skills in pre-school. Forty-one children completed follow-up assessments of reading comprehension, reading accuracy, and listening comprehension in YOS1.

Ensuring communication-friendly green and public spaces for sustainable cities: Sustainable Development Goal 11.

Purpose: In this commentary article, we explore the needs of people with communication disability in relation to sustainable and inclusive communities. More green and public spaces is one strategy identified by the United Nations in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for creating sustainable and inclusive communities. We argue that through thoughtful design, these spaces could address the needs of people with communication disability and foster greater social interaction thereby supporting mental well-being.

A systematic review of the academic achievement of primary and secondary school-aged students with developmental language disorder.

Background And Aims: The ability to communicate is a fundamental skill required to participate in school. Students with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have persistent and significant language difficulties that impact daily functioning. However, the impact of DLD on the academic achievement of primary and secondary school-aged students has received limited attention.

Global TALES feasibility study: Personal narratives in 10-year-old children around the world.

Personal narratives make up more than half of children's conversations. The ability to share personal narratives helps build and maintain friendships, promotes physical and emotional wellbeing, supports classroom participation, and underpins academic success and vocational outcomes. Although personal narratives are a universal discourse genre, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research into children's ability to share personal narratives is in its infancy.

The ability of adults with limited expressive language to engage in open-ended interviews about personal experiences.

This study examines how adults with limited expressive language (with average sentences of five words or less) respond to open-ended questions. Participants ( = 49) completed a baseline measure and were then interviewed about a personal experience using exclusively open-ended questions, followed by open-ended and directive questions about a staged event. Their interviews were coded for mean length of utterance (MLU), number of different words and six dimensions of the Narrative Assessment Profile.

Expository discourse skills of students with reading comprehension difficulties.

The ability to produce expository discourse (the use of language to convey information) is important for classroom participation and access to the curriculum, particularly during the middle school years. This study investigated the spoken expository discourse skills of students with reading comprehension (RC) difficulties compared to their peers with average reading skills. In this study, we administered a modified favourite game or sport (M-FGS) task developed by Heilmann and Malone to 48 students who were in their fifth year of schooling (9.

Spoken Language Change in Children on the Autism Spectrum Receiving Community-Based Interventions.

We assessed the spoken language of 73 preschool aged children on the autism spectrum receiving community-based early intervention at two time points, approximately 7 months apart. Using the Spoken Language Benchmarks, there was a small non-significant change in the proportion of children transitioning from below, to at or above, Phase 3 (word combinations). Using binomial regression, a model comprising seven of nine clinician-proposed child-related predictors explained 64% of the variance.

Prompting visual attention to print versus pictures during shared book reading with digital storybooks for preschoolers with ASD compared to TD peers.

Prompting children to look at print and picture content during shared book reading (SBR) facilitates joint attention and early language and literacy learning opportunities for typically developing (TD) children. Whether preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) respond similarly to bids for joint attention during SBR and how autism characteristics impact upon their responsiveness is currently unclear. This is important given these children are at risk of persistent language and literacy challenges.

Inferential narrative comprehension ability of young school-age children on the autism spectrum.

Background And Aims: The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in inferential narrative comprehension in the group of children with autism could be explained by the children's structural language ability as measured using a broad-spectrum standardized language test.

Methods: The participants were 35 children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), aged between 5;7 and 6;11, who attended their first year of formal schooling, and 32 typically developing (TD) children, matched to the ASD group for age and year of schooling.

Classroom Teachers' Implementation of the Social Stations Intervention to Improve the Verbal Initiations and Responses of Students with Autism.

Students with autism often show challenges in social communication, particularly in initiating and responding behaviors. While the classroom offers a natural context for peer interactions, few interventions are designed specifically for classroom settings. This study investigated the effects of a classroom-teacher implemented social communication intervention, known as Social Stations, on the initiating and responding behaviors of students with autism.

Investigating Adolescent Discourse in Critical Thinking: Monologic Responses to Stories Containing a Moral Dilemma.

Purpose The adolescent developmental task of establishing autonomy from parents is supported through various aspects of executive functioning, including critical thinking. Our aim was to investigate younger and older adolescent language performance in form, content, and use in response to a moral dilemma task. Method Forty-four typically developing adolescents completed a language sampling task, responding to stories that contained a moral dilemma for one of the characters.

Brief Report: Associations Between Autism Characteristics, Written and Spoken Communication Skills, and Social Interaction Skills in Preschool-Age Children on the Autism Spectrum.

We used parent-report data from a prospective longitudinal study to better understand the early strengths in written skills often observed in preschoolers on the spectrum. Consistent with previous research, children demonstrated relative strengths in standardized written communication compared to spoken communication scores on the VABS-II. We found no significant links between children's performance on the written communication subdomain and their autism characteristics or the Social Interaction Deviance Composite score on the CCC-2.

Emergent Literacy Assessment in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Who Have Limited Verbal Communication Skills: A Tutorial.

Purpose Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of experiencing difficulties with the development of literacy, including the emergent literacy skills recognized to underpin conventional literacy success. Comprehensive assessment is essential. Characteristics of ASD can make assessment challenging, and this can be compounded when children are unable to demonstrate their skills using spoken language.

Introduction to the Forum: Literacy in Autism-Across the Spectrum.

Purpose The purpose of this article is to introduce the Forum: Literacy in Autism-Across the Spectrum. The articles in this forum provide an overview of the current evidence related to literacy in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from preschool to adolescence and highlight the high literacy needs of this population. Method This introduction provides an overview of some of the reasons why children with ASD are at risk of persistent literacy difficulties and a summary of the six articles included in this forum.

Clinician Proposed Predictors of Spoken Language Outcomes for Minimally Verbal Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Our aim was to explore insights from clinical practice that may inform efforts to understand and account for factors that predict spoken language outcomes for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder who use minimal verbal language. We used a qualitative design involving three focus groups with 14 speech pathologists to explore their views and experiences. Using the Framework Method of analysis, we identified 9 themes accounting for 183 different participant references to potential factors.