Atypical Speech, Language and Communication Development

Dear Colleagues,

The aim of this Special Issue is to showcase state-of-the art articles on different issues related to atypical speech, language and communication development in childhood, younger adults and senior people. Specifically we aim at putting together research from different disciplines, intending to cover a complete set of conditions causing those linguistic disorders.

As a consequence of the complex and multifaceted nature of human language, on the one hand, the study of children's communicative difficulties is at the interface between medicine (pediatricians, neurologists, ENT specialists) and the allied professions (speech and language therapists, audiologists), as well as education, clinical linguistics and psychology.. On the other hand, the study of age-related changes in cognitive and language functions has been also focused by different disciplines including linguistics, communication sciences, psychology, gerontology and neuroscience, among others. In both cases, professionals in these disciplines may adopt different ways of conceptualizing and approaching the communicative difficulties that affect these populations.

By bringing together papers from multiple disciplines and perspectives we hope to be able to gain a better understanding of the field and to share new insights regarding methodology. In this sense, we seek contributions which explore any area related to the development of linguistic abilities in exceptional circumstances in its different dimensions and within the framework of multiple methodologies and formal accounts as used by researchers in the field. These contributions may be either theory-oriented and critically examine issues related to the main topic of this Special Issue or empirically-based, thus  providing findings through solid data and research design.

With regard to children’s communicative disorders, we particularly welcome contributions that take both a usage-based theoretical framework and a social-pragmatic approach to linguistic abilities in childhood (Tomasello 2003, 2008) and that aim at providing an answer to the following questions: (i) to what extent do the communicative difficulties children experience in everyday life depend only on the nature of their impairments?; and (ii) which is the role played by the type of opportunities given by the environment? (Bishop et al. 2016). This approach will allow us to establish levels of functional impairment instead of classifying children as suffering from this or that disability. In this sense, we would like to emphasize the need to address issues such as cultural and linguistic diversity (Battle 2002, Goldstein 2000 and Roseberry-McKibbin 2018). There has been relatively little work investigating populations other than monolingual speakers of Indo-European languages and even though Aguilar-Mediavilla et al. (2019) present an overview of the most recent findings in several relevant fields dealing with atypical language development in children speaking Romance languages, further research is also required to investigate the implications not only of culturally and linguistically diverse societies in bi/multilingual children with speech, language and communication development difficulties, but also the implications of this approach for assessing and treating individuals with language needs. We believe that this Special Issue will contribute to address this research gap by including contributions from researchers working with multicultural and/or bi/multilingual children whose linguistic abilities develop under exceptional circumstances.In relation to communication, hearing and swallowing disorders in the older adult (either mono- or multilingual), it is our goal to provide current information regarding not only normal aging changes in cognitive and linguistic processes, but also exceptional ones, which refer to a language deterioration at language comprehension and production level as well as to swallowing function. The question becomes to what extent can they interfere with daily living and independent functioning? In other words, what we bear in mind are some of the specific communicative declines which are often seen in senior people such as word retrieval (namely the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon), sentence comprehension, reading or discourse abilities, among others. (Wright 2016, Hickey et al. 2018)

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

^* Atypical linguistic abilities development (including delayed or deviant language acquisition difficulties): Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

* Speech, Language and Communication Developmental Disorders associated with biomedical conditions (neurobiological aspects, genetic syndromes)

* Sign Languages Disorders (Deafness and Hearing loss)

* Co-occurring disorders associated with or derived from Speech, Language and Communication Developmental Disorders: socio-contextual, emotional and behavioural aspects; learning disabilities related to atypical language development in childhood.

* Linguistic technologies at the service of Speech, Language and Communication disorders

* Atypical bi/multilingual Speech, Language and Communication disorders (including minority/minoritized languages)

* Neurodegenerative diseases (i.e., Dementia -early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia-,  Parkinson’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Multiple Sclerosis)

* Acquired neurogenic language disorders (Cerebrovascular diseases, i.e. Stroke-Related Aphasia)

* Speech Sound Disorders: voice and fluency disorders, motor speech disorders (articulation disorders, dysarthria, dyspraxia)

* Diagnosis and assessment of Speech, Language and Communication disorders: early diagnosis, dynamic and ecologically valid assessment (linguistic profiling, natural observation questionnaires/interviews), standardized tests

The deadline for abstract submissions is March30, 2020. The length of abstracts should be around 500 words. Abstracts can be sent to the Guest Editor of this volume (ana.codesido@usc.es) or to Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). Once the abstract is approved, we expect to receive a full version of the manuscript by May 30, 2020.

All submitted manuscripts will be anonymously reviewed. The assessment criteria include originality and significance of research, theoretically-driven literature review and currency of references, validity and reliability of research designs and methods. As to the projected length of the Special Issue and articles, the overall target length of this Special Issue would be 90,000 to 135,000 words with articles that are between 8,000 and 10,000 words in length; that is, 10 to 12 articles plus a solid introductory content article. 

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

• Abstract submission deadline: March 30, 2020

• Notification of abstract acceptance: April 15, 2020
• Full manuscript deadline: July 30, 2020

We look forward to receiving your abstract submissions!

Prof. Ana Isabel Codesido-García
Guest Editor

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