In her very interesting Keynote Article, Johanne Paradis gives a clear overview of recent research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders, and highlights its theoretical and clinical implications. She raises the challenging question of "whether bilingualism can be viewed as a kind of "therapy" for SLI." At first…

Joanne Paradis' Keynote Article on bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI) is an impressive overview of research in language acquisition and language impairment. Studying different populations is crucial both for theorizing about language acquisition mechanisms, and for practical purposes of diagnosing and supporting children with…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

Bilingualism is often considered an inappropriate developmental choice for children with specific language impairment (SLI) because, according to a widespread belief, these children's limited capacity for language would be overtaxed by learning two linguistic systems. However, there has not been adequate empirical investigation of SLI in bilingual…

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Presents a system for coding and analyzing dialogue involving preschool age children. Each participant assumes roles of initiator and responder and is evaluated according to different scales. Illustrates the system through recorded dialogue between mothers and their three-year-old daughters. (Author/BK)

Describes a follow-up study of 25 boys who had been diagnosed with Specific Expressive Language Delay (SELD) at 24 to 30 months of age. At three to four years, half of the boys continued to exhibit poor expressive language skills, suggesting that young children diagnosed with SELD are at considerable risk for continuing language problems. (33…

Refutes the reanalysis of a phonologically disordered child's use of fricatives as developed by Fey (1989) within a relational framework. Evidence in the form of nonsystematic correspondence between the child's substitution patterns and the target sound system is used to further establish accuracy of the original independent generative analysis…

Reports a method of clinically inducing a phonemic split in a misarticulating child. Three stages were observed in the acquisition of this split: (1) complementary distribution (allophones of the same phoneme); (2) position-specific free variation (intermediate to the phonemic split); and (3) phonemic distribution for some morphemes (phonemic…

To study whether metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingualism flow on to reading acquisition, word awareness skills were developed in one group of monolingual English children and in another "marginal bilingual" group. Results strengthen the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness. (Contains 63…

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

Exploration of the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8 to 14 and 14 to 20 months; established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months; and showed a profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word…

A study tested models concerning syntactic categories in early multiword speech by investigating overlap in contexts in which children (n=11) used determiner types. Results indicate children have little knowledge of relationships between different determiner types, suggesting development of an adultlike syntactic determiner category may be…