Objectives: The lexical-level deficits are one of the hallmark limitations observed in early school-age children with specific language impairment. These problems are the predictors of reading problems and poor performance at school. Most studies in Persian-speaker children with specific language impairment have focused on syntax and morphology and the naming errors profile of these children ar...

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a disorder characterised by slow, abnormal language development. Most children with this disorder do not present any other cognitive or neurological deficits. There are many different pathological developmental profiles and switches from one profile to another often occur. An alternative would be to consider SLI as a generic name covering three developmenta...

Pragmatic aspect of second language (L2) as a component of communicative competence has recently received more attention. Many research studies have investigated the gap between native and nonnative speakers’ command of L2 pragmatics. However, development of L2 pragmatics has been the focus of few studies. In this study, how coursebooks can help both nonnative teachers and learners develop L2 p...

The role of Trisomy 21 in causing specific speech and language development is discussed by Paoloni-Giacobino and colleagues in a recent report of the development of a 14 year old girl with mosaic Down syndrome. Trisomic cells are reported as being from 0.7% – 12% in different cell lines. This young girl is reported to have moderately delayed articulation and phonology and reduced fluency in her...

Despite the well documented pragmatic deficits that can arise subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage (RHBD), few researchers have directly studied everyday conversations involving people with RHBD. In recent years, researchers have begun applying Conversation Analysis (CA) to the everyday talk of people with aphasia. This research programme has provided novel insights into the complex inte...

We aimed to disentangle contributions of socio-pragmatic and structural language deficits to narrative competence by comparing the narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 25), non-autistic children with language impairments (LI; n = 23), and children with typical development (TD; n = 27). Groups were matched for age (6½ to 15 years; mean: 10;6) and non-verbal ability; ASD...

This study characterized the profile of pragmatic abilities among 24 children with hearing loss (HL) aged 6.3-9.4 years, 13 using hearing aids (HAs) and 11 using cochlear implants (CIs), in comparison to those of 13 hearing children with similar chronological and language ages. All the children with HL used spoken language, attended regular schools, and received communication therapy twice a we...

alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. these approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (bachman, 1990; bachman & palmer, 1996). the present study tries t...

veryfew attempts have been made in the past to develop instruments to measure pragmatic knowledge of second language (l2) learners. the absence of such instruments in the literature of english language teaching (elt) underscores the need for the researchers to develop new tests that are specifically designed to assess this crucial but less explored aspect of language learners’ (lls) knowledge. ...