Scotland is experiencing a period of radical educational transformation in the effort to raise attainment. Dearden argued for the promotion of autonomy in 1975 at another time of sweeping educational change. The principle of autonomy is firmly entrenched in Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence and seen as key to ensuring pupils develop a broad…

Although the syntactic priming methodology is a promising tool for language acquisition researchers, using the technique with children raises issues that are not problematic in adult research. The current paper reports on an individual differences study that addressed some of these outstanding issues. (a) Does priming purely reflect syntactic…

Word learning can build the high-quality word representations that support skilled reading and language comprehension. According to the partial knowledge hypothesis, words that are partially known, a.k.a. "frontier words" (Durso & Shore, 1991), may be good targets for instruction precisely because they are already familiar. However,…

Background: Children with poor language abilities tend to perform poorly on verbal working memory tasks. This result has been interpreted as evidence that limitations in working memory capacity may interfere with the development of a mature linguistic system. However, it is possible that language abilities, such as the efficiency of sentence…

The topic of differential diagnosis and its application to the use of the Revised Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) is discussed. The theoretical bases for differential diagnosis and the properties of assessment instruments with diagnostic properties are presented.…