This article reviews literature relating to the role of severe congenital speech impairment on phonological processing before reporting on a study of five adults with severe congenital speech impairments and their responses on tasks involving reading, receptive vocabulary, lexical decision making, and phoneme identification. Difficulties with…

This study examined the receptive language skills of young children (4-6 years old) with specific language impairment (SLI). Specifically, the authors looked at their ability to fast-map semantic features of objects and actions and compared it to the performance of age-matched peers with normally developing language (NL). Children completed a…

One of the ways to improve the reliability in perceptual voice quality rating is to provide listeners with external anchors. A paired comparison matching paradigm using synthesized Cantonese voice stimuli that covered a range of rough and breathy qualities were used to investigate the rating reliability. Twenty-five speech pathology students rated…

Characterizing early communicative development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is valuable for understanding profiles of ability in this population. The current investigation was modeled on Charman, Drew, Baird & Baird (2003b). Analyses explored parent report of early vocabulary, non-verbal communication, functional object use and…

Successful community-university partnerships are usually attributed, at least in part, to clear communication processes. This chapter reflects on language and context as elements in developing a strong partnership process.

The comparison of cognitive and linguistic skills in individuals with developmental disorders is fraught with methodological and psychometric difficulties. In this paper, we illustrate some of these issues by comparing the receptive vocabulary knowledge and non-verbal reasoning abilities of 41 children with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder in…

The writing performance of 64 elementary school children with a history of specific language impairment was examined to evaluate both the nature of the children's difficulties with writing and the relationship between oral language, reading, and writing. Children were assessed at age 8 on a range of language, literacy, and cognitive measures and…

Background: Traditionally, autism and specific language impairment (SLI) have been regarded as distinct disorders but, more recently, evidence has been put forward for a closer link between them: a common set of language problems, in particular receptive language difficulties and the existence of intermediate cases including pragmatic language…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

Studies are needed to better understand the broad autism phenotype in young siblings of children with autism. Cognitive, adaptive, social, imitation, play, and language abilities were examined in 42 non-autistic siblings and 20 toddlers with no family history of autism, ages 18-27 months. Siblings, as a group, were below average in expressive…

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and…

Background: Children with specific language impairment experience story comprehension deficits. Research with typically developing children, poor comprehenders and poor readers has shown that the use of mental imagery aids in the comprehension of stories. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program in the use of mental imagery…

A growing body of research suggests that children with language disorders are at risk for social adjustment problems and school failure. This paper provides further evidence regarding this situation, assessing the strength of the relationship between receptive language and social adjustment in a sample of the general population of public school…

Background: Empirical research suggests that social disadvantage has a negative effect on the development of language, and related cognitive skills such as reading. There is, however, no corresponding body of research on the impact of social disadvantage on motor development. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of…

Purpose: To provide the first detailed information about native language abilities of children who are or had been institutionalized. Method: The language of ten 30-month-old children raised in Romanian orphanages was compared with that of 30 chronological-age-matched peers: 10 children who had moved recently from orphanages to foster care, 10…