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. 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. Only the first seven papers and the final one (on children with literacy difficulties) discuss issues related to language disorders. Papers on normal language development outnumber those on abnormal language development by the ratio of 2:1. 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.

Authored by 59 specialists, these papers render a variegated picture of the study of child language development and disorders. This volume collects 27 papers originally presented at the 1998 Child Language Seminar at the University of Sheffield.

Malist review