No abstract

In typical development, emergent literacy skills predict successful reading abilities. Code-related literacy skills may include letter knowledge, print concepts, early writing and early phonological awareness. Meaning-related literacy skills may include lexical and grammatical ability, story retelling and comprehension. Children with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) show, on the most part, poor reading comprehension abilities, yet up to date, research regarding emergent literacy skills in ASD is limited. We conducted a study to investigate a naturalistic, standards-based national literacy programme, for five kindergartners with ASD, of age 5-8 years in their kindergarten setting. We implemented an ASD-adapted intervention as an intensive group treatment over 6 weeks, with a pretest-posttest design to examine emergent literacy gains. The children with ASD demonstrated gains in both code-related and meaning-related skills following intervention. The clinical and theoretical implications are discussed regarding the importance of an intensive structured literacy intervention for children with ASD before entering school.

In this study, we videotaped two 10-min. free-play interactions and coded speech acts (SAs) in peer talk of 51 preschoolers (21 ASD, 30 typical), interacting with friend versus non-friend partners. Groups were matched for maternal education, IQ (verbal/nonverbal), and CA. We compared SAs by group (ASD/typical), by partner's friendship status (friend/non-friend), and by partner's disability status. Main results yielded a higher amount and diversity of SAs in the typical than the ASD group (mainly in assertive acts, organizational devices, object-dubbing, and pretend-play); yet, those categories, among others, showed better performance with friends versus non-friends. Overall, a more nuanced perception of the pragmatic deficit in ASD should be adopted, highlighting friendship as an important context for children's development of SAs.

This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development-the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two vowels (where the latter were disyllabic). The quantitative data are drawn from the speech of six monolingual hearing-impaired Hebrew-speaking children using a cochlear implant device. Their age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session. The elicitation procedure was based on spontaneous speech and picture naming. Findings indicate that cochlear implant users produce CFWs at the initial stage of the prosodic word development. This study claims the CFWs characterize a transitional period between babbling and speech, which varies between different types of populations. The transitional period is rather short in typically developing children, who hardly ever produce CFWs, greater in cochlear implant children, and the greatest in developmental speech disorders such as dyspraxia. Clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.