New Directions in Language Development and Disorders (review)

This volume collects 27 papers originally presented at the 1998 Child Language Seminar at the University of Sheffield. Authored by 59 specialists, these papers render a variegated picture of the study of child language development and disorders. The papers are organized into seven divisions: (1) ‘Normal and abnormal language development: Common ground?’—7 papers; (2) ‘Language universals and language specifics’—4 papers; (3) ‘Argument structure’—3 papers; (4) ‘Verbs and verb morphology’—5 papers; (5) ‘Phonology’—3 papers; (6) ‘Pragmatics and discourse’—2 papers; and (7) ‘Literacy’—3 papers. Papers on normal language development outnumber those on abnormal language development by the ratio of 2:1. Only the first seven papers and the final one (on children with literacy difficulties) discuss issues related to language disorders.

The child language disorder addressed in the volume, termed ‘Specific Language Impairment’ (SLI), is characterized by significant deficits in language learning ability while the hearing, intelligence, and neurological system of the child all appear normal. Nonetheless, such children often tend to have attention deficit disorder, developmental coordination disorder, impairments of social interaction, and difficulty in nonlinguistic cognitive processing, especially on timed tasks.

Just as poorly-known languages (particularly those of the Far East) are sometimes excluded, or simply ignored, from certain studies of language universals and typology (since they do not fit well into proposals based largely on European languages), data from children with SLI have not received due attention in research on child language. Should this trend continue, our understanding of child language development will be seriously compromised. As noted in the first two papers by Laurence Leonard and Gina Conti-Ramsden respectively, the rich data from children with SLI have much to contribute to theories of language learning. A well-performing orchestra produces harmonious symphonies, but an ill-performing one would reveal to us the many possibilities in which a symphony could fall apart. The ultimate theory of language learning should be able to account for not only the normal path of language development but also the varied disorders observed with children with SLI.

Given the large number of papers in the collection, I will not go into detail about their findings. It is noteworthy that research on child language development, as attested in the present volume, has expanded its frame of studies well beyond the normal monolingual children of English speakers. While most papers focus on such children, Romance languages are featured in four papers (two on syntactic issues in French, and one each on verb morphology for Spanish and Italian). Other European languages investigated include Greek (one on pronominal reference and the other on literacy skills), Dutch (on verb morphology), and Finnish (on producing three-syllable words by twins). Furthermore, two papers deal with bilingual children acquiring English-German and English-Latvian; one paper conducts a crosslinguistic study between English and Italian (on implicit causality in visual perception and cognition verbs). From outside Europe, we find a paper on the acquisition of sentence-final particles in Japanese and two papers on learning problems of some Hebrew children.