Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
People say between 150 and 200 words a minute on average during a casual conversation.
Even through cute but unintelligible babbles, infants are hard at work learning how to become successful communicators.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an intricate and complicated diagnosis. The spectrum of presentations and severity is as expansive as the theorized causes. Autism’s complexity and breadth of impacts on a person’s life means that it has a multitude of facets to investigate.
In 2001, newborn screening of Hmong babies had an alarming number of positive results for an enzyme deficiency called MBADD.
There is extremely limited population-based research on social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SCD).
Ellis Weismer is an expert on language learning disorders in children. She has contributed new insights into three major language-associated disorders: autism spectrum disorder, developmental language disorder, and children who are late to talk.
In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing-a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps because participants were adolescents and/or children with strong language skills.
Weak central coherence (processing details over gist), poor oral language abilities, poor suppression, semantic interference, and poor comprehension monitoring have all been implicated to affect reading comprehension in individuals with ASD.
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, often have significant delays with expanding their vocabularies and other language skills compared to typically developing children. Yet, “we know very little about [language] processing in [children with ASD] or the mechanisms underlying it,” says Susan Ellis Weismer, a professor of communication sciences and disorders at UW–Madison …
Title: Brief Report: Fast mapping predicts differences in concurrent and later language abilities in children with ASD. Legend: Receptive and expressive language at age 3½ and age 5½ by fast mapping profile group. PLS-4 = Preschool Language Scale, 4th Edition. Error bars represent one standard error. Left panel: At age 3½, poor learners had significantly lower receptive …
