Clinical Linguistics

This book covers different aspects of speech and language pathology and it offers a fairly comprehensive overview of the complexity and the emerging importance of the field, by identifying and re-examining, from different perspectives, a number of standard assumptions in clinical linguistics and in cognitive sciences. The papers encompass different issues in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, discussed with respect to deafness, stuttering, child acquisition and impairments, SLI, William’s Syndrome deficit, fluent aphasia and agrammatism. The interdisciplinary complexity of the language/cognition interface is also explored by focusing on empirical data from different languages: Bantu, Catalan, Dutch, English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.
The aim of this volume is to stress the growing importance of the theoretical and methodological linguistic tools developed in this area; to bring under scrutiny assumptions taken for granted in recent analyses, which may not be so obvious as they may seem; to investigate how even apparently minimal choices in the description of phenomena may affect the form and complexity of the language/cognition interface.

Shari A. Epstein, University of Arizona in Linguist List (Jan. 2003):
One of the greatest strenghts of this collection is that it draws from many languages. This allows a particular disorder to be examined in different linguistic contexts and for theories to be tested on languages other than those with which they were developed. [...] even though each paper is interesting in and of itself, the real value of the collection is in the integration of the various ideas presented.