Background: In Lower Saxony, Germany, pre-school children with language- and speech-deficits have the opportunity to access kindergartens with integrated language-/speech therapy prior to attending primary school, both regular or with integrated speech therapy. It is unknown whether these early childhood education treatments are helpful and…

Background: Children's low scores on vocabulary tests are often erroneously interpreted as reflecting poor cognitive and/or language skills. It may be necessary to incorporate the measurement of word-learning ability in estimating children's lexical abilities. Aims: To explore the reliability and validity of the Dynamic Assessment of…

Background: Several studies in recent years have indicated a link between socio-economic status (SES) of families and children's language development, including studies that have measured children's language through formal standardized test procedures. High numbers of children with low performance have been found in lower socio-economic groups in…

Background: Sure Start has been a flagship policy for the UK Labour Government since 1998. Its aim was to improve the life chances of children under five years of age who live in areas of socio-economic disadvantage by means of multi-agency, multidisciplinary Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs). Speech and language therapists have played a key…

Background: Children with Down syndrome experience difficulty with both spoken and written language acquisition, however controlled intervention studies to improve these difficulties are rare and have typically focused on improving one language domain. Aims: To investigate the effectiveness of an integrated intervention approach on the speech,…

Background: Pragmatic assessment methods are very diverse and differ in informant type. Some rely on parents, others on teachers/professionals and some directly test pragmatic abilities in the children themselves. A widely used pragmatic parent questionnaire is the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2). However, it is not known how scores…

Background: Mothers facilitate their young hearing children's word learning by making reference explicit for novel words through physical designation (e.g., with deictic gestures) and by isolating words in simple syntactic frames. As children's language skills develop, such modifications decrease. Less is known about hearing mothers' support to…

Background: There is a great deal of evidence to support the robust relationship between phonological awareness and literacy development. Researchers are beginning to understand the relationship between the accuracy and distinctiveness of stored phonological representations and performance on phonological awareness tasks. However, many of the…

Background: Clinicians rely on parents to provide information regarding the onset and development of stuttering in their own children. The accuracy and reliability of their judgments of stuttering is therefore important and is not well researched. Aim: To investigate the accuracy of parent judgements of stuttering in their own children's speech…

Background & Aims: Preschool and early school-aged children with specific language impairment not only have spoken language difficulties, but also are at risk of future literacy problems. Effective interventions targeting both spoken language and emergent literacy skills for this population are limited. This paper reports a feasibility study of a…

Background: In the Lidcombe Program of Early Stuttering Intervention, parents present verbal contingencies for stutter-free and stuttered speech in everyday situations. A previous randomized controlled trial of the programme with preschool-age children from 2005, conducted in two public speech clinics in New Zealand, showed that the odds of…

Background: A large proportion of children are exposed to more than one language, yet research on simultaneous bilingualism has been relatively sparse. Traditionally, there has been concern that bilingualism may aggravate language difficulties of children with language impairment. However, recent studies have not found specific language impairment…

Background: Although children with speech disorder are at increased risk of literacy impairments, many learn to read and spell without difficulty. They are also a heterogeneous population in terms of the number and type of speech errors and their identified speech processing deficits. One problem lies in determining which preschool children with…

Background: Clinicians in the UK rely mainly on informal observations and structured and semi-structured tasks rather than standardized testing in their assessments of pre-school children referred with speech and language difficulties. The informal nature of the clinical decision-making process at this age is unsurprising given the dearth of…

Background: A number of previous studies have revealed that children with Specific Language Impairment have limitations in Phonological Working Memory as revealed by a task that requires them to repeat non-words of increasing syllable length. However, most published studies have used non-words that are phonotactically English. Aims: The purpose…