Crosslinguistic Encounters in Language Acquisition

This book presents diverse, original research studies on typical and atypical child language acquisition in monolingual, bilingual and bi-dialectal settings, with a focus on development, assessment and research methodology. Languages investigated in the studies include underrepresented languages, such as Farsi, Greek, Icelandic, isiXhosa, Maltese, Mandarin and Slovene, without excluding representative work in major languages like English and Spanish. The language areas of focus are phonology, lexicon, morphology and syntax and the book incorporates studies in under-researched language impairment, such as Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome and language impairment in 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome. The book has practical significance in that it proposes tools and assessment practices that are of universal crosslinguistic relevance while also dealing with language-specific complications. The studies presented enhance existing knowledge and stimulate answers on what the acquisition of disparate languages in different contexts can teach us about language/communication development in the presence or absence of disorder.

Elena Babatsouli is Associate Professor and the Blanco/BORSF Endowed Professor in Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech and co-edits the Multilingual Matters book series Communication Disorders Across Languages.

David Ingram is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a crosslinguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976), Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981) and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.  

Nicole Müller is Professor and Head of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include multilingualism and neurogenic and neurodegenerative conditions leading to cognitive-communicative impairments. She is co-editor (with Martin J. Ball) of the book series Communication Disorders Across Languages.