Background and aims: A high rate of children in mental health services have poor language skills, but little evidence exists on how mental health support is delivered to and received by children with language needs. This study looked at parental experiences, asking parents of children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) about…

This study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08-16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language- and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4-7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact…

Background: Evidence-based practice includes research evidence, clinical expertise and stakeholder perspectives. Stakeholder perspectives are important and include parental ethno-theories, which embrace views about many aspects of speech, language and communication, language development, and interventions. The Developmental Niche Framework…

Background: Effective co-practice is essential to deliver services for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). The necessary skills, knowledge and resources are distributed amongst professionals and agencies. Co-practice is complex and a number of barriers, such as "border disputes" and poor awareness of respective…

There are some children with speech and/or language difficulties who are significantly more difficult to understand in connected speech than in single words. The study reported here explores the between-word behaviours of three such children, aged 11;8, 12;2 and 12;10. It focuses on whether these patterns could be accounted for by lenition, as…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine prevalence and predictors of persistent speech sound disorder (SSD) in children aged 8 years after disregarding children presenting solely with common clinical distortions (i.e., residual errors). Method: Data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (Boyd et al., 2012) were used.…

Compared to the treatment of consonant segments, the treatment of vowels is infrequently described in the literature on children's speech difficulties. Vowel difficulties occur less frequently than those with consonants but may have significant impact on intelligibility. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of vowel targeted intervention (VTI)…

"Talk of the Town" is a community led approach to supporting the speech, language and communication (SLC) skills of children and young people, aged 0-19, living in areas of social disadvantage. It is delivered by the Communication Trust. This evaluation reports on a randomised controlled trial undertaken with 2696 pupils in 64 primary…

Background: Sentence imitation has been identified as a good indicator of children's language skills, with performance differentiating children with specific language impairment and showing relationships with other language measures. It has a number of advantages over other methods of assessment. The assessment of morphosyntax in children who have…

Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is one measure of variability. As currently implemented, kinematic data are used, requiring equipment that cannot be used with some patient groups or in scanners. An experiment is reported that addressed whether STI can be extended to an audio measure of sound pressure of the speech envelope over time that…

The conference papers from a colloquium on issues in bilingualism and biculturalism include: "Le bilinguisme et biculturalisme: essai de definition" ("Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Attempt at Definition") (Francois Grosjean); "La variation individuelle dans l'acquisition d'une langue seconde" ("Individual…