There are a number of clinical options available for speech-language pathologists to choose from to analyze a child's phonological system, select treatment targets, and design intervention. Frequently, each of these areas of clinical options is viewed independently of one another or approached within an eclectic framework. In this article, an…

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-[delta]/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) experience social difficulties, including conflict management. The factors involved in peer-conflict progression in pre-school children with LI, and which of these processes may differ from pre-school children with typical language development (TL), is therefore examined. Aims: To describe the…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

Williams syndrome is a genetic disorder that, it has been claimed, results in an unusual pattern of linguistic strengths and weaknesses. The current study investigated the hypothesis that there is a reduced influence of lexical knowledge on phonological short-term memory in Williams syndrome. Fourteen children with Williams syndrome and 2…

Background: Parents and professionals can both play a role in improving children's expressive language development and a number of alternative models of delivery exist that involve different levels of input by these two groups. However, these alternative treatments have not been subject to rigorous comparative analysis in terms of both cost and…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…

In this article Tortora, a dance therapist, interviews Myron Hofer, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Columbia University. Dr. Hofer has spent decades studying how the mother's behaviors and actions shape and regulate the physiological, neurophysiological, and psychological functioning of her babies--specifically,…

The ''ba, ba, ba'' sound universal to babies' babbling around 7 months captures scientific attention because it provides insights into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition and vestiges of its evolutionary origins. Yet the prevailing mystery is what is the biological basis of babbling, with one hypothesis being that it is a non-linguistic…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

Grammaticality judgments and processing times associated with violation detection were examined in typically developing children, children with focal brain lesions (FL) acquired early in life, and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical sensitivity in the FL group, while below typically developing children, was above levels…

Much Australian work on immigrant languages has revealed that the family is a crucial site of language maintenance (LM). The family remains for most immigrants and their offspring the main domain for community language (CL) use. At the same time, there is no doubt that positive language, education and migration policies strengthen the maintenance…

There is a growing recognition of the importance of pre-literacy skills among pre-school children. Evidence that children from relatively deprived backgrounds face poorer outcomes in speech and language development and educational achievement has led to an assertive attempt to lessen social inequalities at the earliest opportunity. The UK…

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

Three different visual skills, along with Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, speeded naming, and syllable deletion skills were tested twice over one school year among 118 Hong Kong and 96 Xiangtan, China kindergartners. Results revealed that a task of Visual Spatial Relationships [Gardner, M. F. (1996). "Test of visual-perceptual…