It is argued that, because of hearing factors, the children with HI are below a threshold for intake of spoken language input (a threshold easily reached by the controls). Thus, the children with HI are more input-dependent at the point in development studied and as such are more sensitive to input frequency effects. The findings suggest that optimizing or indeed increasing auditory input of GMs may have a positive impact on GM development for children with moderate HI.

There can be wide variation in the level of oral/aural language ability that prelingually hearing-impaired children develop after cochlear implantation. Automatic perceptual processing mechanisms have come under increasing scrutiny in attempts to explain this variation. Using mismatch negativity methods, this study explored associations between auditory sensory memory mechanisms and verbal working memory function in children with cochlear implants and a group of hearing controls of similar age. Whilst clear relationships were observed in the hearing children between mismatch activation and working memory measures, this association appeared to be disrupted in the implant children. These findings would fit with the proposal that early auditory deprivation and a degraded auditory signal can cause changes in the processes underpinning the development of oral/aural language skills in prelingually hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants and thus alter their developmental trajectory.

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This article considers the theoretical and practical relationship between core linguistics and sociolinguistics in relation to the emergence of Principles and Parameters Theory. Parameters were introduced into core Chomskyan linguistics in an effort to account for variation between languages. However, as we argue – and as has long been known in sociolinguistics – languages (French, Italian etc.) are social rather than abstract products. In this sense, core linguistics may need to pay more attention than it has in the past to aspects of actual variation in order to understand the limits and range of parameters. Thus we argue that dialects of languages in themselves have parameters, and as such may be defined within parametric limits. Here we believe there is something of interest to sociolinguists, in terms both of structural definitions and of overall historical development. In general, then, while variation has always been central to sociolinguistics, it is now central, in one sense, to core linguistics; and here we have the opportunity to explore ways in which sociolinguistics and core linguistics may relate to each other in their interest in variation. (Parameters; variation; dialect; Belfast; Ireland)

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