Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, April 2015; 29(4): 247–248 ß 2015 Informa UK Ltd. ISSN: 0269-9206 print / 1464-5076 online DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2015.1015686
Editorial ¨ LLER MARTIN J. BALL & NICOLE MU IKE/Enheten fo¨r Logopedi, Linko¨ping University, Linko¨ping, Sweden
This issue is the first of two devoted to papers from the 15th meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, held in Stockholm from June 11 to 13, 2014. As with special issues for previous ICPLA conferences, the papers included here have all undergone the usual rigorous peer-review process used by the journal. The papers included in this issue cover the main areas of the speech and language sciences: phonetics, phonology, lexis, syntax and semantics. Natalia Zharkova and her co-authors Fiona Gibbon and Bill Hardcastle present an investigation of a currently popular instrumental technique in clinical phonetics: ultrasound. As with many imaging techniques, one problem is that of stabilization of the speaker. If the speaker moves their head during data acquisition, then it is difficult to directly compare different parts of an utterance. The work reported here underlines the importance of considering head stabilization in ultrasound studies. Lili Yeh, Bill Wells, Joy Stackhouse and Marcin Szczerbinski investigated phonological awareness in children acquiring Mandarin, especially of constituent parts of the syllable. However, as well as looking at the development of awareness, the authors were able to use their data to compare the merits of different models of the syllable in Mandarin. An interesting outcome of their study was that children by age 10 had not substantially improved on phoneme awareness tasks over previous years, suggesting that this ability had not improved with increasing exposure to literacy. Marianne Lind and colleagues Hanna Simonsen, Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm, and BjørnHelge Mevik provide a lexical database for clinicians and clinical linguists working with Norwegian. The database described contains around 1600 words, and is searchable by semantic, lexical, morphological and phonological characteristics. Also, users can search by frequency of use, and age of acquisition. The article describes ways in which the database can be used in both research and therapy. Jodi Tommerdahl and Cynthia Kilpatrick describe a study of child directed speech. Their particular area of interest is test–retest reliability, and they looked at frequency of morphosyntactic productions in 17 mothers talking to their children, and the reliability of these measures when taken from different lengths of the transcripts (e.g. 50 compared to 200 word samples). These results were then compared to those from an earlier study of children aged 2;6 to 3;6. The authors conclude that frequency was greater in the adults, but relative frequency was similar
Correspondence: Martin J. Ball, IKE/Enheten fo¨r Logopedi, Linko¨ping University, SE-581 83 Linko¨ping, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
248 Editorial between them. However, they also found that reliability was lower in the adult samples than in the child ones. Yalda Kazemi, Thomas Klee and Helen Stringer examined language sample measures for Persian-speaking children and their diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing language impaired from normally developing speakers. They found that many of the measures were able to identify children without language impairment, but were less successful at identifying those with language impairment. The final paper in this issue is by Seung-yun Yan and Diane Sidtis and explores hemispheric specialization for common and proper nouns. Left-hemisphere damaged speakers and healthy controls took part in recognition and production tasks of both common and proper nouns. Their results suggest that both hemispheres are involved in recognizing proper nouns, while the left hemisphere is involved with the production of both common and proper nouns. We look forward to presenting the second set of selected papers from ICPLA 2014 later in this volume.
Copyright of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Editorial ¨ LLER MARTIN J. BALL & NICOLE MU IKE/Enheten fo¨r Logopedi, Linko¨ping University, Linko¨ping, Sweden
This issue is the first of two devoted to papers from the 15th meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, held in Stockholm from June 11 to 13, 2014. As with special issues for previous ICPLA conferences, the papers included here have all undergone the usual rigorous peer-review process used by the journal. The papers included in this issue cover the main areas of the speech and language sciences: phonetics, phonology, lexis, syntax and semantics. Natalia Zharkova and her co-authors Fiona Gibbon and Bill Hardcastle present an investigation of a currently popular instrumental technique in clinical phonetics: ultrasound. As with many imaging techniques, one problem is that of stabilization of the speaker. If the speaker moves their head during data acquisition, then it is difficult to directly compare different parts of an utterance. The work reported here underlines the importance of considering head stabilization in ultrasound studies. Lili Yeh, Bill Wells, Joy Stackhouse and Marcin Szczerbinski investigated phonological awareness in children acquiring Mandarin, especially of constituent parts of the syllable. However, as well as looking at the development of awareness, the authors were able to use their data to compare the merits of different models of the syllable in Mandarin. An interesting outcome of their study was that children by age 10 had not substantially improved on phoneme awareness tasks over previous years, suggesting that this ability had not improved with increasing exposure to literacy. Marianne Lind and colleagues Hanna Simonsen, Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm, and BjørnHelge Mevik provide a lexical database for clinicians and clinical linguists working with Norwegian. The database described contains around 1600 words, and is searchable by semantic, lexical, morphological and phonological characteristics. Also, users can search by frequency of use, and age of acquisition. The article describes ways in which the database can be used in both research and therapy. Jodi Tommerdahl and Cynthia Kilpatrick describe a study of child directed speech. Their particular area of interest is test–retest reliability, and they looked at frequency of morphosyntactic productions in 17 mothers talking to their children, and the reliability of these measures when taken from different lengths of the transcripts (e.g. 50 compared to 200 word samples). These results were then compared to those from an earlier study of children aged 2;6 to 3;6. The authors conclude that frequency was greater in the adults, but relative frequency was similar
Correspondence: Martin J. Ball, IKE/Enheten fo¨r Logopedi, Linko¨ping University, SE-581 83 Linko¨ping, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
248 Editorial between them. However, they also found that reliability was lower in the adult samples than in the child ones. Yalda Kazemi, Thomas Klee and Helen Stringer examined language sample measures for Persian-speaking children and their diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing language impaired from normally developing speakers. They found that many of the measures were able to identify children without language impairment, but were less successful at identifying those with language impairment. The final paper in this issue is by Seung-yun Yan and Diane Sidtis and explores hemispheric specialization for common and proper nouns. Left-hemisphere damaged speakers and healthy controls took part in recognition and production tasks of both common and proper nouns. Their results suggest that both hemispheres are involved in recognizing proper nouns, while the left hemisphere is involved with the production of both common and proper nouns. We look forward to presenting the second set of selected papers from ICPLA 2014 later in this volume.
Copyright of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
