Preverbal communication means any social behavior that occurs before children communicate verbally. Generally, these communicative behaviors are categorized into two ways: as behavior regulation (BR) or joint attention (JA) skills. BR, also referred to as requesting, involves the use of behaviors to gain something or receive assistance (Mundy et…

Linguistics and Communication Disorders are considered two different disciplines by most students and scholars in both fields as well as by researchers working in other relevant fields such as psychology and education. However, most core disorders, disabilities and delays in communicative ability directly concern language, especially in…

I commend Johanne Paradis not only for her interesting Keynote Article but also for the careful research that she has conducted along with her collaborators in the area of bilingual language development and disorders. Her contributions have been significant and are sure to shape our theoretical as well as clinical understanding of specific…

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

The purpose of the current study is to document phonological change from a multidimensional perspective for a 3-year-old boy with phonological disorder by comparing three measures: (1) accuracy of consonant productions, (2) dynamic assessment, and (3) acoustic analysis. The methods included collecting a sample of the targets /s, [image omitted],…

Language Development: Understanding Language Diversity in the Classroom offers comprehensive coverage of the language development process for pre- and in-service teachers while emphasizing the factors that further academic success in the classroom, including literacy skills, phonological awareness, and narrative. With chapters written by respected…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

To produce spontaneous and generalized language use by severely disabled individuals, the language training context and content must be examined. Training methods can better approximate the conditions of natural language use when they involve: generation of spontaneous language responses to effect real-world changes, single performance "trials,"…

The Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind (WLG) theory of the neurobiological basis of language is of great historical importance, and it continues to exert a substantial influence on most contemporary theories of language in spite of its widely recognized limitations. Here, we suggest that neurobiologically grounded computational models based on the WLG…

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

Two studies are reported in which the following theory is tested: the agrammatic sentence form that is observed in the spontaneous speech of Broca's aphasics is attributable to the selection of elliptical syntactic structures in which the slots for many of the closed-class words that appear in complete sentences are lacking. (54 references)…

The first study investigates the validity of the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument as a diagnostic tool for differenciating the ability of language impaired preschoolers to use language to communicate complex ideas. The second study evaluates the relative effectiveness of two software environments that were expected to enhance children's…