Understanding children with language problems. Shula Chiat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 286.

Extract

Examining the language abilities of children with language disorders should be a deductive process, using much more than the data that formal measures provide. The assessment should be a systematic, psycholinguistic exploration of aspects of a child's input and output, with a focus on the attempt to pinpoint specific areas of deficit within the language-processing system. Chiat, in this insightful and extremely accessible book, provides basic profiles of children with language disorders, along with case study examples, that both illustrate various forms of language disorder and demonstrate the use of tasks, commonly applied in psycholinguistic research, to problem-solve specific cases. Chiat is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at City University, London, where she is an established researcher who focuses primarily on phonological development and disorders and the impact of impaired phonology on lexical/semantic development.