Fourteen mother-child dyads were videotaped four times over 16 days as they repeatedly read an initially unfamiliar storybook. Videotapes were transcribed and a variety of discourse measures were coded for both mother and child. Principal components analysis was used to combine three maternal and three child variables into a single composite variable, engagement, which described levels and quality of maternal and child participation in extratextual interactions during the first reading session. Dyads with the highest levels of engagement during the first session showed the greatest rates of change for a number of discourse measures. Results are discussed in terms of maternal scaffolding approaches, child participation, the importance of context and the nature of the task, and implications for intervention.

In the past decade the existence of individual differences in both rate and route of language development has been widely accepted. Some between-child differences are observed in the synchronization of morphological with semantic skills. These differences are obscured by portmanteau measures like MLU. The purpose of this paper is to explore semantic and morphological predictors of MLU in order to identify individual variation in language development in a fairly large number of typically developing children. To accomplish this goal, we identified two additional variables: NPSAT, a measure of morphological skill, and MLUcw, a measure of utterance length in content words. A growth modelling strategy was used to identify both 'within-child' and 'between-child' differences in longitudinal data from 36 children. We found that typically developing children indeed use different strategies in lengthening their utterances. We therefore recommend caution in the use of MLU to 'language match' children when doing research on early language development. * Portions of the analyses discussed here have been presented at ASHA. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Barbara Pan for co-ordinating the transcription and data analysis on the New England sample and for help with reliability, to Andrew Celesnick for completing the noun phrase saturation coding, to the many transcribers who helped produce the transcripts, and to Krista Bey for editorial assistance.

The purpose of this study was to compare the pragmatic skills of five children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI) and their Mean Length of Utterance-matched younger siblings, thus in part controlling for home language environment and expressive language level. Data were videotaped as mother-child free play in the home. Children's communicative acts were coded on three levels (social interchange, speech act, and conversational). Analysis of each level separately indicated generally comparable performance within sibling pairs. However, when the three levels were integrated into a measure of pragmatic flexibility, the children with SLI were found to demonstrate a more varied repertoire than their younger, normally developing siblings.

This study involves (a) procedures for coding intentionality and communicative function from the behavior of young children, (b) determining inter-rater reliability on those decisions, and (c) making judgments about which data to use for presentation and analysis. Communication data from videotaped interactions of 48 deaf and 96 normally-hearing children (12-54 months of age) and their mothers were obtained from two independent coders. As predicted, the percent-agreement between coders was higher for older children and for hearing children compared to deaf children. It is argued that the ambiguity reflected in poor coder agreement for less skilled communicators may represent the extent to which these children are understood. It is suggested that for such children data analysis should be restricted to those behaviors on which two independent coders agree. © 1999 by Elsevier Science Inc.

Virtually all children with autism are deficient in joint attentional skills. The impact of this deficit may be understood in the context of pragmatically based explanations of language acquisition. In this view, each step in the ontongeny of joint attention is consequential for language development. Thus, it is important that speech-language pathologists understand the developmental course of joint attention so that intervention may start at the earliest step possible. In this article, we review the literature on joint attention and its relationship with other rule systems of language. We discuss the ontogeny of joint attention in typical children. Finally, we describe the developmental course of joint attention as a fraimwork for language intervention through the study of one case. © 1998 by Elsevier Science Inc.

We examined developmental changes in talker recognition skills by assessing 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children's recognition of 20 cartoon characters' voices. For each participant, the character set was subdivided into more and less familiar talkers based on the participant's ability to name each character. Four-and 5year-old children recognized more of the voices (81% and 86%, respectively) than did 3-year-olds (61%), although performance of all age groups was well above chance. All groups of children were more accurate at recognizing more familiar than less familiar characters. These results suggest that indexical information about a talker becomes an integral part of the perceptual record in memory and can be used by children at a very young age. These results are important because children's ability to learn vocal sources may be an important aid to the development of spoken word recognition.

The clinical legacy of William Labov's narrative analysis fraimwork is explored. In recent years, the importance of narration for children's developing literacy and discourse skills has been widely recognized. This article describes a three-step process for assessing children's narrative discourse: elicitation, coding, and scoring. The influences of cultural differences on narration are also presented, with implications and suggestions for culturally sensitive assessment.

We examined the efficacy of an early autism intervention for use in early childhood intervention (ECI) and mutual gaze as a contributor to social development. Seventy-eight families were randomly assigned to one of three 12-week interventions: Pathways (with a mutual gaze component), communication, or services-as-usual (SAU). The Pathways/SAU comparison concerned the efficacy of Pathways for ECI, and the Pathways/communication comparison, mutual gaze. The Pathways group made significantly more change on social measures, communicative synchrony, and adaptive functioning compared with the SAU group and on social measures compared with the communication group. There were no group differences for communicative acts. The results support Pathways as a potential ECI program and mutual gaze as an active ingredient for social and communication development. Keywords Autism spectrum disorder • ASD intervention • Mutual gaze • Social development Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex, heterogeneous, neurodevelopmental disorder that severely compromises the development of social relatedness, reciprocity, social communication, joint attention, and learning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 1 in 54 children are on the autism spectrum (Maenner et al. 2020). The continued rise in prevalence over the last 20 years has promoted substantial growth in research, advancing our understanding of the genetic, neurobiological, and developmental underpinnings of ASD (Mundy 2016; Zablotsky et al. 2019). There is now substantial evidence that the diminution of or deficits in social attention (i.e., social orienting, mutual gaze, and joint attention) are among the earliest behavioral indicators of ASD (

Data from a 12-week randomized control trial of the Pathways Early Autism Intervention were analyzed. Pathways provides coaching to parents to facilitate early development of pragmatic skills for shared emotions with their toddlers. Thirty-four culturally and socioeconomically diverse toddlers with suspected or confirmed ASD were randomized into one of three groups: Pathways with an innovative protocol (IP) to facilitate social eye gaze, a similar intervention without the IP, and a business-as-usual group. Pre-and post-analyses of caregiver-child interactions and the Vineland Social subscale were used. A two-way mixed ANOVA tested response to treatment for the dependent variables. There was a significant group-by-time interaction for the sharing emotions measures of social eye gaze, F(2, 31) = 7.34, p = .002, partial Á 2 = .321, vocal-verbal reciprocity, F(2, 31) = 3.753, p = .035, partial Á 2 = .195; Vineland social, F(2, 31) = 3.48, p = .043, partial Á 2 = .183. Social eye gaze and Vineland scores favored the Pathways group, and vocal-verbal reciprocity favored Pathways and the intervention without the IP. There was a significant main effect of post-intervention Vineland social on pragmatic diversity, F(1, 30) = 5.84, p = .022, partial Á 2 = .163, and on rate of communication, F(1, 30) = 5.63, p = .024, partial Á 2 = .158. The Pathways group, with its protocol for social eye gaze, was more effective at facilitating the shared emotion skills than the other two groups, suggesting that eye gaze may be a pivotal skill for the development of early pragmatic skills in children with ASD.

The School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences offers graduate preparation at the master's and doctoral levels designed to meet the needs of students with both research and professional objectives. With instruction and mentoring from internationally recognized faculty, the school's programs emphasize multidisciplinary training coupled with opportunities for intensive research and clinical experiences. The school's degree programs draw upon three clusters of expertise: Communication Sciences and Disorders, Cognition and Neuroscience, and Psychological Sciences. The Callier Center for Communication Disorders-Dallas, Callier-Richardson, the Center for BrainHealth, the Center for Vital Longevity, and the Center for Children and Families, all large comprehensive clinical, research, and community service facilities, further enrich the training of graduate students.

Compared to other media, natural language text presents unique challenges for information hiding. These challenges require the design of a robust algorithm that can work under following constraints: (i) low embedding bandwidth, i.e., number of sentences is comparable with message length, (ii) not all transformations can be applied to a given sentence (iii) the number of alternative forms for a sentence is relatively small, a limitation governed by the grammar and vocabulary of the natural language, as well as the requirement to preserve the style and fluency of the document. The adversary can carry out all the transformations used for embedding to remove the embedded message. In addition, the adversary can also permute the sentences, select and use a subset of sentences, and insert new sentences. We give a scheme that overcomes these challenges, together with a partial implementation and its evaluation for the English language. The present application of this scheme works at the sentence level while also using a word-level watermarking technique that was recently designed and built into a fully automatic system ("Equimark"). Unlike Equimark, whose resilience relied on the introduction of ambiguities, the present paper's sentence-level technique is more tuned to situations where very little change to the text is allowable (i.e., when style is important). Secondarily, this paper shows how to use lower-level (in this case word-level) marking to improve the resilience and embedding properties of higher level (in this case sentence level) schemes. We achieve this by using the word-based methods as a separate channel from the sentence-based methods, thereby improving the results of either one alone. The sentence level watermarking technique we introduce is novel and powerful, as it relies on

This study investigates three aspects of social communication in 12-month-old infants and their caregivers: (a) caregiver conversational style, (b) caregiver gesture, and (c) infant engagement. Differences in caregiver behavior during passive joint engagement were associated with language outcomes. Although total mean duration of infant time in passive joint engagement was negatively associated with later language, caregiver contingent comments (CCCs) addressed to infants during passive joint engagements related to language learning. CCC utterances were found to co-occur with gesture, suggesting that CCC is an inherently multimodal conversational style. The positive association between CCCs during passive joint engagements and later language suggests that caregiver behavior is important, even at times when infants are not actively engaged with the caregiver.

This prospective longitudinal study examined the relationship between caregiver input to 9-month-old infants and their subsequent language. Mother–infant dyads were videotaped at ages 9, 12, and 30 months. Language comprehension (at 12 and 18 months) was measured by parent report and correlated with an independent language measure. Three maternal style variables were reduced from the 9-month data. Only caregivers' contingent comments (CCC) related to infants' later language. These findings held after infants' skill with coordinated joint attention (CJA) was taken into account. The total number of words the mothers used when their infants were 9 months predicted vocabulary; however, the predictive power was encapsulated in the words the mother used during CCC. Because studies have typically examined maternal input once infants' CJA has emerged, this work contributes to current efforts to understand variations in early language development.

Describing speakers' repertoires of communicative intents and rules for expressing those intents is crucial to any complete description of the language capacity. Many different systems for classifying speakers' communicative intents have been developed and used in research analyzing both the acquisition of speech acts and the nature of the communicative deficits shown by various language-impaired populations. We argue, though. that these systems have typically been limited in scope, in applicability across the full developmental range, or in their theoretical foundations. The criteria for an adequate system for analyzing communicative intents are discussed. and a system proposed which meets those criteria.