It remains unclear whether pragmatic language skills and core language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are distinct language domains. The present work aimed to tease apart these domains using a novel online assessment battery administered to almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that pragmatic and core language domains could be measured separately, but that both domains were highly related (r = .79). However, zero-order correlations between pragmatic tests were quite small, indicating that task-specific skills played an important role in performance, and follow-up exploratory factor analysis suggested that pragmatics might be best understood as a family of skills rather than a domain. This means that these different pragmatic skills may have different cognitive underpinnings and also need to be assessed separately. However, our overall results supported the idea that pragmatic and core aspects of language are closely related during development, with one area scaffolding development in the other.

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years to adulthood using the Expressive, Receptive, and Recall of Narrative Instrument (ERRNI). We show that the number of clauses per utterance increased steadily through this age range. However, the distribution of clause types depended on which of two stories was narrated, even though both stories were designed to have a similar story structure. In addition, clausal complexity was remarkably similar regardless of whether the speaker described a narrative from pictures, or whether the same narrative was recalled from memory. Finally, our findings with the youngest children showed that the task of generating a narrative from pictures may underestimate syntactic competence in those aged below five years.

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice picture-matching sentence comprehension task and a sentence repetition task. Thirty-three typically developing children completed both assessments, which included relative clauses representing a range of syntactic roles. Results revealed a similar order of difficulty of constructions on both measures but little agreement between them when evaluating individual differences. Interestingly, repetition was the easier of the two measures, with children showing the ability to repeat sentences they did not understand. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the additional processing load resulting from the design of multiple-choice comprehension tasks, and highlights the fact that these assessments are invoking skills beyond those of linguistic competence.

In most individuals, language production and visuospatial skills are subserved predominantly by the left and right hemispheres, respectively. Functional Transcranial Doppler (fTCD) provides a noninvasive and relatively low-cost method for measuring functional lateralization. However, while the silent word generation task provides an accurate and reliable paradigm for investigating lateralization of language production, there is no comparable gold-standard method for measuring visuospatial skills. Thirty undergraduate students (19 females) completed a task of spatial memory while undergoing fTCD recording. Participants completed this task at two different time points, separated by between 26 to 155 days. The relative activation between hemispheres averaged across all participants was found to be consistent across testing sessions. This was observed at the individual level also, with a quantitative index of lateralization showing high reproducibility. These findings indicate that the use of the spatial memory task with fTCD is a robust methodology for examining laterality of visuospatial skills. (JINS, 2009, 15, 1028–1032.)

The assessment of nonword repetition in children goes back at least to 1974, when the Goldman–Fristoe–Woodcock Auditory Skills Battery was published, including a subtest (Sound Mimicry) assessing nonword repetition (Goldman, Fristoe, & Woodcock, 1974). Nevertheless, it was not until 20 years later, when Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) reported a study of short-term memory in children with specific language impairment (SLI), that a theoretical framework was developed linking deficits in nonword repetition to impaired language acquisition. Gathercole's Keynote in this issue (2006) tells the story of how this initial study revealed a striking nonword repetition deficit in children with SLI, complementing work on typically developing children showing a major role of phonological short-term memory (STM) in word learning. As she points out, the story is a complex one: phonological STM is not the only skill tapped by the nonword repetition task, and children may do poorly for different reasons. Furthermore, relationships between nonword repetition and word learning may be reciprocal, with vocabulary level affecting children's ability to segment nonwords efficiently and retain them in memory. However, the original finding, that deficient nonword repetition is a strong correlate of SLI, has stood the test of time, to the extent that poor performance on this test has been used successfully as a marker of a heritable phenotype in molecular genetic studies of SLI (Newbury, Monaco, & Bishop, 2005).

Multivariate genetic analysis was used to examine the genetic and environmental aetiology of the interrelationships of diverse linguistic skills. This study used data from a large sample of 4½-year-old twins who were tested on measures assessing articulation, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and verbal memory. Phenotypic analysis suggested two latent factors: articulation (2 measures) and general language (the remaining 7), and a genetic model incorporating these factors provided a good fit to the data. Almost all genetic and shared environmental influences on the 9 measures acted through the two latent factors. There was also substantial aetiological overlap between the two latent factors, with a genetic correlation of 0·64 and shared environment correlation of 1·00. We conclude that to a large extent, the same genetic and environmental factors underlie the development of individual differences in a wide range of linguistic skills.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have distinctive impairments in the comprehension of sentences that involve long-distance syntactic relationships. This has been interpreted as evidence for impairment in an innate grammatical module. An alternative theory attributes such difficulties to lower level problems with speech perception or deficits in phonological working memory. These theoretical accounts were contrasted using comprehension data from three subgroups: 20 children with SLI, 19 children with mild–moderate hearing loss, and normally developing children matched on age and/or language level. There were close similarities between the hearing-impaired and SLI groups on a measure of phoneme perception. Children with SLI did poorly on tests assessing knowledge of Binding principles and in assigning thematic roles in passive sentences whereas hearing-impaired children performed close to control levels, indicating that poor speech perception cannot account for this pattern of deficit. However, the pattern of errors on syntactic tasks and the relatively weak correlation between different indicators of syntactic deficit seemed incompatible with a modular hypothesis. We propose that limited processing capacity is the principal determinant of deficient syntactic comprehension in SLI.

Phonological skills, language ability, and literacy scores were compared for four groups: 19 children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (SNH), 20 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 20 controls matched on chronological age to the SNH group (CA), and 15 controls matched on receptive vocabulary level to a subset of the SLI group (CB). In common with the SLI group, mean scores of children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were significantly poorer on tests of phonological short-term memory, phonological discrimination, and phonological awareness than CA controls. No differences between group means were observed in SNH and CA control groups on vocabulary, digit and sentence recall, sentence comprehension, and literacy scores. However, there was considerable individual variation within the SNH group. Nearly 50% of the SNH group showed phonological impairment associated with poorer expressive and receptive vocabulary and higher hearing thresholds than remaining children without phonological impairment. Nonword repetition deficits were observed in SNH subgroups with and without phonological impairment and were of a similar magnitude to those observed in children with SLI. Indeed, poorer repetition in children with SLI could only be differentiated from children with SNH on phonologically complex nonwords. Overall, findings suggested major problems in nonword repetition and phonological impairment occurred without clinically significant deficits in wider language and literacy abilities in children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Implications for theories of SLI are discussed.