Linguistic recycling in typical and atypical interaction.

I present evidence that linguistic "recycling" - i.e., the redeployment of linguistic material from prior utterances during conversation - is a striking and prevalent feature not only of interaction between typical speakers, but also, and notably, of interaction involving the communication impaired.

Idiosyncratic gesture use in atypical language development, and its interaction with speech rhythm, word juncture, syntax, pragmatics and discourse: a case study.

Very little is known about the use of gesture by children with developmental language disorders (DLDs). This case study of 'Lucy', a child aged 4;10 with a DLD, expands on what is known and in particular focuses on a type of idiosyncratic "rhythmic gesture" (RG) not previously reported. A fine-grained qualitative analysis was carried out of video recordings of Lucy in conversation with the first author.

Clinical linguistics: its past, present and future.

Historiography is a growing area of research within the discipline of linguistics, but so far the subfield of clinical linguistics has received virtually no systematic attention. This article attempts to rectify this by tracing the development of the discipline from its pre-scientific days up to the present time. As part of this, I include the results of a survey of articles published in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics between 1987 and 2008 which shows, for example, a consistent primary focus on phonetics and phonology at the expense of grammar, semantics and pragmatics.

Conversational success in Williams syndrome: communication in the face of cognitive and linguistic limitations.

Williams syndrome (WS) is characterized by apparent relative strengths in language, facial processing and social cognition but by profound impairment in spatial cognition, planning and problem solving. Following recent research which suggests that individuals with WS may be less linguistically able than was once thought, in this paper we begin to investigate why and how they may give the impression of linguistic proficiency despite poor standardized test results. This case study of Brendan, a 12-year-old boy with WS, who presents with a considerable lack of linguistic ability, suggests that impressions of linguistic competence may to some extent be the result of conversational strategies which enable him to compensate for various cognitive and linguistic deficits with a considerable degree of success.

Lexical knowledge and lexical use in autism.

One aspect of autistic language that has been infrequently researched is vocabulary and the conceptual knowledge underpinning individual words or word types. In this descriptive study we investigate anomalous vocabulary use in a 70,000-word corpus of conversational autistic language and examine evidence that concept formation, and hence vocabulary, is abnormal in autism. Particular attention is paid to the expression of artifact and temporal concepts which some believe may develop abnormally in autism.

Pragmatic ability and disability as emergent phenomena.

A holistic approach to pragmatic ability and disability is outlined which takes account both of the behaviour of individuals involved in the communicative process, and also of the underlying factors which contribute to such behaviour. Rather than being seen as resulting directly from a dysfunction in some kind of discrete pragmatic "module" or behavioural mechanism, pragmatic impairment and also normal pragmatic functioning are instead viewed as the emergent consequence of interactions between linguistic, cognitive and sensorimotor processes which take place both within and between individuals.

Validation of linguistic analyses in narrative discourse after traumatic brain injury.

Narrative discourse tasks are a common feature of assessment and research after traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other types of brain damage. Although stimulus materials and analysis methods have been developed from a variety of theoretical perspectives, many do not challenge cognitive-linguistic skills sufficiently to highlight individual difficulties in assessment after TBI. This study employed a complex story recall task and it aimed to develop analysis methods that were sensitive to differences in recalled narratives and which could be validated against the perceptions of external raters.