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Facial expressions in sign language carry a variety of communicative features. While emotion can modulate a spoken utterance through changes in intonation, duration and intensity, in sign language specific facial expressions presented concurrently with a manual sign perform this function. When deaf adult signers cannot see facial features, their ability to judge emotion in a signed utterance is impaired (Reilly et al. in Sign Lang Stud 75:113-118, ). We examined the role of the face in the comprehension of emotion in sign language in a group of typically developing (TD) deaf children and in a group of deaf children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We replicated Reilly et al.'s (Sign Lang Stud 75:113-118, ) adult results in the TD deaf signing children, confirming the importance of the face in understanding emotion in sign language. The ASD group performed more poorly on the emotion recognition task than the TD children. The deaf children with ASD showed a deficit in emotion recognition during sign language processing analogous to the deficit in vocal emotion recognition that has been observed in hearing children with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent conversation analytic work has revealed that there are systematic differences between the ways in which patients with epilepsy and patients with “psychogenic” nonepileptic seizures describe their seizure experiences. But these differences may not become apparent if patients are exposed to traditional fact-oriented questioning. This article describes a one-day intervention workshop, informed by conversation analysis, which was designed to help doctors change their questioning style and solicit diagnostically useful narrative features. A comparison of video recordings of 38 routine consultations before the intervention, and 20 consultations after it, showed that the intervention had the desired effect. Doctors’ problem-presentation solicitation changed, and the patient responses were better suited to revealing diagnostically relevant features of their talk. Data are in British English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. I also trace the gradual broadening of the discipline from its roots in structural linguistics to its current reciprocal relationship with speech and language pathology and a range of other academic disciplines. Finally, I consider the scope of clinical linguistic research in 2011 and assess how the discipline seems likely develop in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the appeal of dynamic assessment (DA) for speech and language therapists (SLTs), and describes the usefulness of various DA models and methods. It describes the background to DA, and the uses to which DA has been put, by educational psychologists in the UK, and by SLTs in the USA. The research and development of methods of DA are described, and the case for developing DA methods for use in a) research and predictive applications, and b) clinical applications to inform interventions by SLTs and in collaborative practice, is made. Implications for future research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]