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Siblings play and enjoy together, and also have conflicts and quarrels. This way, they teach each other important things, mostly how to communicate with others. Kids on the autism spectrum have challenges in social communication, acquiring social skills, and applying them. Therefore, many researchers were interested in negative influences that children on the autism spectrum could have on the sibling relationship in the family. Other researchers were interested in the positive aspects of these relationships. In this paper, we review aspects unique to relationships between kids on the autism spectrum and their siblings.

This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were characterized. Developmental trajectories of toddlers with various demographic characteristics, such as education, income, religiosity level, birth order of the child, and child-care arrangements were compared. Results show that the lexical growth curves for Hebrew are comparable to those reported for other languages. Sex, birth order, and child-care arrangements were found to influence the size of lexicons. It is recommended that the trajectories presented here be used as norms for lexical growth among typical Hebrew-speaking toddlers in the second year of life.

This observational study focuses on prosocial behaviors of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during an interaction with their older, typically developing sibling (TD-Sibs). Twenty-eight sibling dyads, in which the younger sibling was diagnosed with ASD (ASD-Sibs), were video-recorded at home playing a game of their choice. Video recordings were microanalyzed, measuring frame-by-frame observational indices of prosocial behaviors. Siblings’ interactions were mostly collaborative. During the interaction, the older TD-Sibs initiated more actions and the younger ASD-Sibs imitated more. The frequency of the prosocial behaviors of the ASD-Sib was associated with the frequency of the TD-Sib’s prosocial behaviors. The findings emphasize the importance of sibling interactions as an opportunity for children with ASD to practice prosocial behaviors.

This study examined the natural social interest of 193 (95 boys, 98 girls) typically developing preschoolers aged 41 to 77 months ( M = 61.71 months, SD = 8.48 months) toward their included peers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; N = 16, M = 66.8, SD = 8.80). A hierarchical linear model examined the role of endogenous (within-child) and exogenous (environmental) variables in explaining typically developing children’s natural social behaviors. Results indicated the significant contribution of three variables: (a) typically developing children’s prosocial behaviors, (b) teachers’ attitudes about their training regarding inclusion, and (c) areas of inclusion support needed by the specific child with ASD. Discussion highlighted possible interactions among these variables within the social–ecological theoretical framework, for explaining peer relations of typically developing children with peers with ASD in regular preschools.

We examined how teachers in three types of Israeli schools perceive the prominence of mentoring and instruction domains of their role in school. Using the Concept Structuring Analysis Task (ConSAT) interview protocol, 21 experienced middle school teachers were asked to create individual concept maps representing their perceptions of their role. We structurally and thematically analysed the maps created by seven teachers from each of the following educational contexts (i.e. organisation and ideology): 1) Public schools implementing the ‘Personal Education’ program, in which teachers act as students’ personal and group mentors; 2) Democratic schools, in which teachers serve as mentors for individual students; 3) Public schools in which teachers focus on subject matter instruction with little or no attention to mentoring. Our findings suggest that the school context in which teachers work is closely aligned with their perceptions of their roles as mentors to their students, with each group of teachers differently prioritising and balancing the mentoring and the instruction domains of their role in school. These findings yield implications for research, policy, and practice, shedding light on the strong link between perceptions of teachers and the organisational and ideological context of the school in which they are employed.

Children with ASD show great variability in their overall linguistic profile. ASD and developmental language disorders (DLD) are seen today as co-morbid conditions. Researchers differentiate between individuals with ASD who have language impairments (ALI-Autism Language Impaired) and those who develop typical language (ALN- Autism Language Normal). This chapter describes the difference between communication, language comprehension, and speech production which together constitute the areas that dictate the linguistic profile of individuals with ASD.

This study examined the Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities of typically developing preschoolers in three age groups: three- to four-, four- to five- and five- to six-years-old (n = 110), who differed in their spontaneous social interest toward included children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social interest was assessed by administering a teacher questionnaire and by nominations of the teacher and educational aide. ToM measures included five tasks of mental-state understanding: (1) diverse desires; (2) knowledge access; (3) diverse beliefs; (4) false belief; and (5) hidden emotions. ToM levels were significantly higher in the socially interested group only for the youngest age group of three- to four-years-old. In this age group, children who showed social interest toward the included peer had higher ToM scores than children who did not reach out to peers with ASD. For better understanding of social interest in the older two age groups, factors other than ToM should be defined and investigated f...

This study examined the contribution of a model of maternal characteristics in explaining mothers’ involvement in the early intervention of their 1- to 7-year-old children with hearing loss. The model of maternal factors affecting mothers’ involvement in intervention comprised (a) four personal characteristics conceived as exogenous variables (anxiety, curiosity, anger, and motivation) and (b) two maternal context-based perceptions conceived as mediating variables (pessimism about their children’s potentials and informal social support). The sample included 114 mother—child dyads (67 boys, 47 girls) who attended the Kesher early intervention program in Israel. Path analysis indicated a high fit between the theoretical model and the empirical findings. Discussion focused on understanding the unique value of mothers’ characteristics for their involvement in their children’s early intervention programs.

Early intervention programs (EIPs) for children with hearing loss (HL) are increasingly characterized by a growing family-centered orientation. This article examined mothers' and professionals' assessments of actual and desired parental involvement in 6 educational centers in Israel that implement an EIP for young children with HL and their parents. Hundred twenty mothers and 60 professionals participated in the study. Data were collected via FOCAS: Family Orientation of Community and Agency Services questionnaire (family and professional versions) that were initially designed in the United States for measuring the level of collaboration between professionals and parents in the course of early intervention. Descriptive statistics and t-test analyses were calculated. The findings indicated that parental involvement in the programs was perceived by mothers and professionals as satisfactorily family centered. However, these programs also need further improvements. Outcomes suggested that parents should be offered a wide range of services to respond to diverse needs, thus increasing parental motivation to become increasingly involved in EIPs.

This article begins with the rationale for a detailed assessment of prelinguistic behaviors in young deaf children. I used a Hebrew adaptation of the parent questionnaire developed by Camaioni, Caselli, Volterra, and Luchenti (1992) in Italy to collect data on a relatively large heterogeneous Israeli sample of deaf participants: 43 deaf children of hearing parents (19 girls and 24 boys) ranging in age from 8 to 49 months. Results indicated that prelinguistic behaviors in deaf infants resemble only to some extent the theoretical model of prelinguistic communication in hearing infants. Unique interrelationships emerged among pointing and early noncommunicative behaviors, yet no correlation emerged between the use of referential gestures and early words or signs. We analyzed findings with respect to the comparison of prelinguistic behavioral characteristics in hearing and deaf children and the collaboration with parents in assessing the prelinguistic behaviors of their own deaf children.

Phonological deficits are common in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, the degree to which they constitute an area of extraordinary difficulty, and their contribution to the morphological deficits of these children are largely unknown. In this investigation, we studied a group of young children with SLI who were acquiring Hebrew, a language in which phonology and morphology are closely linked. The phonology of these children lagged behind that of same-age peers as well as younger normally developing children matched according to mean number of morphemes per utterance. Furthermore, the children with SLI were more likely to commit phonological errors that neutralized important morphological distinctions in their language. These findings have implications for both assessment and therapy. Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, the following learning outcomes will be achieved: The participant will be able to: (1) describe the differences in phonology between children with SLI and typically developing children; (2) describe the impact of phonological disorders on the assessment of the morphological systems of children with SLI; and (3) explain the necessary modifications to a therapy program for children with a combination of morphological and phonological disorders.

Family-oriented early intervention programs have become a common practice in deaf education and intervention. This trend requires the extensive investigation of parents' expectations about programs and professionals in order to enhance the efficacy of parent-professional collaboration. The goal of this study was to closely examine the expectations of mothers whose children were already enrolled i a comprehensive early intervention program for deaf children and their families. Three means of data collection were utilized: two open-ended written questions, an individual oral interview with the mother, and a set of formal questionnaires on various maternal, family, and child characteristics. A heterogeneous sample of 50 mothers of 2- to 5-year-old deaf children in Israel participated in the study. A wealth of maternal expectations emerged from this qualitative methodology, underscoring mothers' impressive knowledge and awareness, as well as individual differences. Through cluster analysis, the mothers were sorted into four distinct groups, yielding interesting patterns of expectations for programs and processionals.

Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) are reported to use grammatical morphology to the same degree as younger normally-developing children with comparable mean lengths of utterance (MLU). Given the difficulty that English-speaking children with SLI seem to experience with morphology and the fact that Hebrew morphology is complicated, such a finding is noteworthy. This issue is explored in the present study through a more thorough assessment of the use of verb inflections by a group of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI and two groups of normally-developing children, one matched with the children with SLI according to age, the other according to MLU. The findings revealed that for a range of verb inflections the Hebrew-speaking children with SLI showed percentages of use that were similar to those seen for the MLU-matched control children. Furthermore, the children with SLI, like their normally- developing counterparts, showed evidence of creative productions, suggesting that more than the memorization of unanalysed forms was at work. The implications of these findings for current accounts of morphological deficits are discussed.

Many English-speaking children with specific language impairment have unusual difficulty with grammatical morphemes such as past tense and third-person singular verb inflections and function words such as articles. Unfortunately, the source of this difficulty is not yet clear, in part because some of the possible contributing factors are confounded in English. In the present study, alternative accounts of grammatical morpheme difficulties were evaluated using children with specific language impairment who were acquiring Hebrew. We examined the grammatical morpheme production and comprehension of 15 Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment, 15 normally developing compatriots matched for age and 15 normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance in words. The results provided tentative support for the notion that grammatical morphemes are less difficult for children with specific language impairment if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be inflected. The possibility that features such as person, number, and gender are missing from the underlying grammars of these children seems less likely.

The Hebrew Parent Questionnaire for Communication and Early Language (HPQ-CEL) was administered by 154 parents of Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1 ; 0 to 1 ; 3 (77 boys, 77 girls). The Questionnaire guided parents in observing and rating their toddlers in six contexts at home. The study aimed to identify inter-correlations between toddlers' non-linguistic behaviors that co-occur during the transition to speech. Seven communicative behaviors were extracted from the questionnaire data: Crying, Vocalizations, Collaboration with Adults, Pointing, Words, Joint Engagement in a Peek-a-Boo Game, and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading. Collaboration with Adults and Triadic Interaction in Book Reading yielded more significant correlations than other prelinguistic behaviors. Participation in social games and book-reading activities was associated with the toddlers' number of words at the period studied.

Forty-two hearing mothers of elementary school age deaf children who have additional handicapping conditions responded to a questionnaire we devised to measure cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attitudes toward sign language (ATSL). Their answers were correlated with measures of the child’s, mother’s, and family’s characteristics. The results showed that more positive ATSL were associated with higher socioeconomic status and with more realistic perceptions of the child’s condition. Mothers who perceived their child’s condition as more severe (regardless of its objective severity) but who were less pessimistic about the child’s future held better attitudes. Mothers who had a stronger sense of coherence expressed more positive cognitive attitudes. Mothers from families that were more generally expressive and active tended to hold more positive attitudes. These results support the notion that ATSL are related to the acceptance of the child’s hearing loss and its severity. Educational implications of the results are discussed.

PurposeThis study was conducted to compare the prelinguistic communicative abilities of toddlers with hearing loss and without hearing loss during the 2nd year of life and shortly before the emergence of productive single-word lexicons.MethodThe participants were 28 toddlers with hearing loss who participated in an early intervention program and 92 toddlers with normal hearing at similar language levels and close chronological ages. The assessment consisted of the Hebrew Parent Questionnaire—Communication and Early Language (HPQ-CEL; E. Dromi, H. Ben-Shahar-Treitel, E. Guralnik, & D. Ringwald-Frimerman, 1992) that guided parents' observations of their toddlers in 6 contexts at home. Parents reported on a range of prelinguistic communicative abilities.ResultsProfile analysis indicated that the 2 groups used a remarkably similar overall profile of prelinguistic behaviors. Interrelationships among behaviors were noticeably similar, too. Two communication properties unique to toddlers with hearing loss were relatively lower spontaneous use of words and reduced involvement in triadic book reading interactions. In addition, the associations between use of words and gestures in toddlers with hearing loss were slightly different from the toddlers with normal hearing, and the range of innovative gestures that they produced was greater.ConclusionThe remarkable similarity between the 2 groups support the feasibility of adopting goals and principles known to hold true in typical development for fostering communication in toddlers with hearing loss.

Verb morphology is often an area of extraordinary difficulty for children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, in Hebrew, this difficulty appears to be more circumscribed than in other languages. In a recent study by Dromi et al., the limitations exhibited by a group of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI were confined primarily to the use of agreement inflections within past tense. This difficulty was interpreted as being due to the fact that the agreement paradigm within past tense is rather complex (involving person, number, and gender, along with tense). This study explores another possibility--that these inflections were difficult because they required past tense in particular. Also determined was whether the children's frequent use of the morphologically simplest forms (such as past third person masculine singular) in place of the correct forms could be interpreted as their selection of a non-finite default form. A group of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI (age 4.2 to 6.1) participated, along with a group of age controls, and a group of younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). The children listened to stories that were accompanied by pictures. During each story, the children completed the experimenter's incomplete sentences using appropriate verbs. To complete the sentences accurately, the children had to alter the tense or finiteness of the verb used by the experimenter in the preceding sentence. The results indicated that the children with SLI had more difficulty than both comparison groups in the production of basic present and past forms and infinitive forms of verbs that required use of one particular phonological template or 'binyan'. However, for the verbs requiring the remaining three phonological templates, the children with SLI were as capable as MLU controls in their command of past as well as present tense, and in their use of infinitive forms. It is concluded that tense and finiteness probably do not form the core of the problem faced by Hebrew-speaking children with SLI in the area of verb morphology.

Cultural, linguistic, and developmental evidence was taken into consideration in constructing the HCDI, a Hebrew adaptation of the MCDI. The HCDI was then administered to a stratified sample of Israeli mothers of 253 toddlers aged 1;6 to 2;0 (M = 1;8.18). Hebrew results are presented and compared with scores from the original MCDI sample (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994). The HCDI is a reliable and sensitive measure of lexical development and emergent grammar, capturing wide variability among Israeli toddlers. In comparison with English, the relation between vocabulary size and age, as well as the shape of the growth curves for nouns, predicate terms, and closed class words relative to size of lexicon, were strikingly similar. These results indicate that conclusions concerning cross-linguistic similarities can be best documented by using parallel methods of measurement. The HCDI results support the claim that early lexical development in Hebrew and in English follow remarkably similar development patterns, despite the typological differences between the two target languages.

Purpose: The present study reports a detailed analysis of written and spoken language samples of Hebrew-speaking children aged 11–13 years who are deaf. It focuses on the description of various grammatical deviations in the two modalities. Method: Participants were 13 students with hearing impairments (HI) attending special classrooms integrated into two elementary schools in Tel Aviv, Israel, and 9 students with normal hearing (NH) in regular classes in these same schools. Spoken and written language samples were collected from all participants using the same five preplanned elicitation probes. Results: Students with HI were found to display significantly more grammatical deviations than their NH peers in both their spoken and written language samples. Most importantly, between-modality differences were noted. The participants with HI exhibited significantly more grammatical deviations in their written language samples than in their spoken samples. However, the distribution of grammatical deviations across categories was similar in the two modalities. The most common grammatical deviations in order of their frequency were failure to supply obligatory morphological markers, failure to mark grammatical agreement, and the omission of a major syntactic constituent in a sentence. Word order violations were rarely recorded in the Hebrew samples. Clinical Implications: Performance differences in the two modalities encourage clinicians and teachers to facilitate target linguistic forms in diverse communication contexts. Furthermore, the identification of linguistic targets for intervention must be based on the unique grammatical structure of the target language.

Earlier reports of verb morphology use by Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) have suggested that these children mark agreement with the subject as accurately as younger control children matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU). This issue was examined in greater detail in the present study by including a wider range of agreement inflections from the present and past tense paradigms and employing verbs of different patterns ( binyanim ). It was hypothesized that children with SLI would be more limited than would MLU controls in their use of agreement inflections within past tense because the past tense agreement paradigm of Hebrew requires the simultaneous manipulation of three features—person, number, and gender. Differences between the groups were not expected for the use of agreement inflections within present tense, because only two features—number and gender—must be manipulated in the present tense paradigm. A group of preschool-age children with SLI was found to have more difficulty than did MLU controls in the use of most past tense agreement inflections. Within present tense, the two groups differed in their use of agreement inflections in only one pattern. For both groups, most errant productions differed from the target form by only one feature, usually person or tense. We found no feature that was consistently problematic for the children. The findings are discussed within a limited processing capacity framework.

Several aspects of the modality system in Modern Hebrew are examined. In general, Hebrew modal expressions are found to be unambiguous as to epistemic and deontic interpretations. The behavior of modal expressions with respect to a number of syntactic categories and constructions is also examined. It is proposed that future investigation focus on the complex morphological structure of the lexical forms expressing notions of Hebrew modality.

The distribution of a number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings on the proportion of grammatically analysable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses are reported. Our analysis reveals that while in some areas there are clearly age-related differences among preschool children, other types of syntactic patternings exhibit a stable behaviour. We refer to the importance of integrating findings for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic constructions across different discourse modes. We also claim that complex interactions between structural, semantic and pragmatic factors underlie the child's acquisition of syntax.

The use of locative prepositions by Hebrew-speaking children aged 2; 0–3; 0, was investigated in a cross-sectional study. Thirty kibbutz children served as subjects. The spontaneous utterances of each child were analyzed and scored for the frequency with which the child supplied obligatory contexts for locative expressions as well as for appropriate use. The findings suggest the following order of acquisition: be- ‘in’; le- ‘to’; le+ pronominal suffixes ‘to’ (dative); al ‘on’; le ‘to’ (directional); mi- ‘from’; al-yad ‘beside’; meaxorey ‘behind’; mitaxat le- ‘under’. The role of formal linguistic complexity in determining that order is discussed. Special reference is made to the contrast between enclitic prefix prepositions and separate word prepositions that express the same locative notions.

Given the nature of Hebrew as a highly synthetic language with rich bound morphology, an attempt was made to establish a measure corresponding to the MLU for a language such as English. The method of calculating MPU (morpheme-per-utterance) which is described here was tried out on 38 Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;0 to 3;0, and measured for internal consistency against different types of elicitation procedures, and for validity by comparison with the subjects' performance on a specially-devised measure of syntactic–semantic development. The results clearly indicate that the MPU is a useful developmental index of the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. Implications of this finding for intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic evaluation are then discussed.