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Purpose: This study compared the language performance of young children with developmental delays who were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 parent-coached language interventions. Differences in performance on augmented and spoken word size and use, vocabulary size, and communication interaction skills were examined. Method: Sixty-eight toddlers with fewer than 10 spoken words were randomly assigned to augmented communication input (AC-I), augmented communication output (AC-O), or spoken communication (SC) interventions; 62 children completed the intervention. This trial assessed the children's symbolic language performance using communication measures from the language transcripts of the 18th and 24th intervention sessions and coding of target vocabulary use. Results: All children in the AC-O and AC-I intervention groups used augmented and spoken words for the target vocabulary items, whereas children in the SC intervention produced a very small number of spoken words. Vocabulary size was substantially larger for AC-O and AC-I than for SC groups. Conclusions: This study found that augmented language interventions that include parent coaching have a positive communication effect on young children with developmental delays who begin with fewer than 10 spoken words. Clinical implications suggest that augmented communication does not hinder, and actually aids, speech production abilities in young children with developmental delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word pairs that illustrated the 8 minimally contrastive pairs of the 6 lexical tones. They discriminated the f0 patterns within contrastive tonal pairs in speech and nonspeech stimuli. Results: In tone identification, the SLI group performed worse than the AM group but not the VM group. In tone discrimination, the SLI group did worse than the AM group on 2 contrasts and showed a nonsignificant trend of poorer performance on all contrasts combined. The VM group generally did worse than the AM group. There were no group differences in discrimination performance between speech and nonspeech stimuli. No correlation was found between identification and discrimination performance. Only the normal controls showed a moderate correlation between vocabulary scores and performance in the 2 perception tasks. Conclusion: The SLI group's poor tone identification cannot be accounted for by vocabulary knowledge alone. The group's tone discrimination performance suggests that some children with SLI have a deficit in f0 processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]