This book contains contributions from eminent clinicians and researchers in the field of language impairment, and crosses the bridge between children and adults. It reflects the developments that have taken place in Speech and Language Therapy over the past 10 years and focuses on issues in SLT that have recently come into ascendancy. These include: personal and social consequences of language disability, and how to measure these; the evidence base for speech and language therapy interventions; language processing and the interplay between language and cognition; and the degree to which impairments in one affect the other. There is a growing concern about the needs of adolescents who have language difficulties - a group who, by their age, development and experience straddle the child/adult divide. It extends the themes by looking at future implications and sets out the challenges ahead for the speech and language therapy profession. 

The pace of research on language learning and use in mental retardation has increased in recent years and taken new direction. This revitalization has been fueled by three factors: 1) advances in genetic technologies allowing investigation of the behavioral phenotypes of well-defined syndromes, 2) an increased emphasis on maximizing abilities of individuals with mental retardation to live and succeed in a broader range of contexts and settings, and 3) theoretical debates concerning the mechanisms of language development and the nature of the human mind.

In the past 30 years, a large and growing number of students in U.S. schools have come from homes in which the language background is other than English. These students present unique challenges for America's education system.

Based on Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children, a comprehensive study published in 1997, this book summarizes for teachers and education policymakers what has been learned over the past three decades about educating such students. It discusses a broad range of educational issues: how students learn a second language; how reading and writing skills develop in the first and second languages; how information on specific subjects (for example, biology) is stored and learned and the implications for second-language learners; how social and motivational factors affect learning for English-language learners; how the English proficiency and subject matter knowledge of English-language learners are assessed; and what is known about the attributes of effective schools and classrooms that serve English-language learners.

Who other than MIT scientist Steven Pinker could explore a single linguistic phenomenon - the use of irregular verbs - from the vantage points of psychology, biology, history, philosophy, linguistics, and child development?In Words and Rules, Pinker answers questions about the miraculous human ability called language and does it in the gripping, witty style of his other bestsellers. As the stories unfold, the reader is immersed in the evolution of the English language over the centuries, the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics, the simulation of neural networks on computers, the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak, the tragic loss of language from neurological disease, and more illustrations using humorous wordplay than anyone would have thought possible. Pinker makes sense of all these phenomena with the help of a single powerful idea: that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.Pinker is well known for his skills of explaining the art and science of language. His bestselling book How the Mind Works was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was the #1 bestselling book for amazon.com in 1997. His other bestseller The Language Instinct was named one of the Ten Best Books of 1994 by The New York Times Book Review and nominated for the William James Book Award by the American Psychological Association.