Interactions among psycholinguistic deficits and literacy difficulties in childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) have been inadequately studied. Comparisons with other disorders (Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and phonological dyslexia) and the possibility of reading remediation in CAS warrant further research. This case study describes the speech, language, cognitive, and literacy deficits and therapy gains in a girl aged 11;6 with severe CAS and borderline IQ. A comprehensive assessment of literacy-related cognitive skills, including phonological memory and working memory capacity, language, speech production and reading skills, was administered. Treatment from 6;0 to 11;6 targeted speech sounds, oral sequencing, phonological awareness (PA), speech-print connections, syllabic structure, and real and non-word decoding. Phonological memory was similar to that of children with SLI, but working memory was significantly worse. Unlike children with phonological dyslexia, our participant demonstrated relative strength in letter-sound correspondence rules. Despite deficits, she made progress in literacy with intensive long-term intervention. Results suggest that the underlying cognitive-linguistic profile of children with CAS may differ from those of children with SLI or dyslexia. Our results also show that long-term intensive intervention promotes acquisition of adequate literacy skills even in a child with a severe motor speech disorder and borderline IQ.

Recent research has acknowledged the importance of morphological awareness, beyond phonological awareness, to literacy achievement in both reading and writing for children, adolescents, and adults. Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize, reflect on, and manipulate the sublexical structure of words-the roots, prefixes, and suffixes. In this paper, we examine the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) to identify explicit gradespecific morphological awareness standards. We then discuss the standards-by-grade within the framework of learning morphology type and morphological aspects, for example, semantic, syntactic, and productive properties. Finally, we discuss the role of speech-language pathologists in collaboration with classroom teachers to support students with speech-language impairment and ELLs to achieve standards in the area of morphology.

The ordinary discourse of parents, and to a lesser degree young children, includes a surprising amount of attention to language. The dinner table conversations of 22 middle class families, each with a child between 2 and 5 1 / 2 years of age, were recorded. Transcripts of these conversations were analyzed for the presence and function of language-focused terms, words such as say, ask, tell, and speak. More than 11% of mothers', 7% of fathers', and 4% of children's utterances contained a languagefocused term. Metalinguistic uses (e.g., reporting and commenting on speech) exceeded pragmatic uses (e.g., controlling when and how speech occurs). Mothers more than fathers, and fathers more than children, talked about language. Mothers', but not fathers, use of language-focused terms was positively correlated with children's use of language-focused terms. The findings suggest that in the course of routine social interactions, parents provide children with potentially important information about the communicative functions of language.

Loss of language-specific morphosyntactic structures, as well as the lexicon, is a hallmark of a `heritage language.' Specific to Russian, previous research suggested the lexicalization of grammatical aspect. This study investigated early stages of attrition in bilingual children with Russian as L1, using the narrative retelling paradigm. Narratives of 15 Russian-English bilingual subjects, between the ages of 4;0 and 10;11, were examined for signs of possible grammatical aspect restructuring as well as language-specific case and agreement errors. Fifteen monolingual Russian-speaking children within the same age range were tested in Moscow using the same methodology. Our results show only a few aspectual errors contextually, but none in morphological devices, among bilingual children. However, we found numerous lexical errors, as well as errors in the domain of morphosyntax. We conclude that L1 attrition takes place selectively with grammatical aspect spared in the initial process. An inverse correlation was found between the number of produced errors and the length of uninterrupted L1. Our results also suggest that consistent use of Russian at home and in extra-curricular activities, in addition to the length of uninterrupted L1, slows down the attrition of one's native language, especially in the presence of the dominant L2 language.

The majority view of reading development maintains the importance of specific cognitive and linguistic abilities, e.g. phonological awareness (PA) and vocabulary and verbal working memory (VWM). Another factor in attaining literacy may be the language of exposure, e.g. whether it has a transparent or a deep orthography. This study examines the interaction between known predictors for literacy development and the orthography. It focuses on early levels of literacy (decoding and spelling) amongst children with typical language development. English-speaking (deep orthography) and Croatian-speaking (transparent orthography) kindergarteners were assessed on measures of vocabulary, PA, functions of verbal working memory, and early literacy skills at the beginning of the kindergarten year. The results indicate that a transparent orthography (Croatian) increases early decoding and encoding skills and they show expected correlations between PA, vocabulary, and early literacy abilities. English speakers did not show these correlations at the onset of the kindergarten year. We postulate that the nature of the deep orthography requires some instructional time for English-speaking children before PA and vocabulary will show predictive validity for reading acquisition.

This study looks at the relationship between L1 (Russian) attrition and L1 reading ability in Russian-English-speaking bilingual children. Ten Russian-English bilingual children and 10 adults participated in this study. Nine out of 10 children participants were born in the US and used L1 as their primary language of interaction within the family, but the intensity and the length of uninterrupted L1 exposure differed for each child. All participants were tested on perception (grammaticality judgement) and production (narrative) tasks to assess their sensitivity to and retention of the morphosyntactic structure of L1. All children showed some attrition of grammatical morphemes, specifically in the Russian systems of declension and conjugation; however, the degree of attrition correlated with reading ability in L1, i.e. children with L1 reading skills showed a lesser degree of attrition for some language-specific morphosyntactic structures. This finding shows interdependence of oral and reading skills and points to the role reading in language with shallow orthography may play in preservation of L1 grammatical structures in oral language. The implications for the clinical applications are also discussed.

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