Speech and Language in the Lab, School, and Clinic

This book reports the proceedings of a May 1976 conference entitled "Implications of Basic Speech and Language Research for the School and Clinic," the sixth conference in the Communicating by Language series, sponsored by the Growth and Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Although the National Institutes of Health are traditionally associated with fundamental research, there has been growing public pressure for improvement in the communication of relevant laboratory research to the teacher and clinician. This conference brought together some of the country's foremost researchers and clinicians in an effort to examine both the present state of research in speech and language and how communication of that research to those concerned with its practical application might be improved. The book proceeds from the more "physical" problems of speech perception and production to the more cognitive problems of language meaning and memory. A summary of current knowledge about each topic is presented by a basic researcher, followed by a discussion from the clinician's point of view. The topics include all aspects of language processing in both adults and children, including physiological and acoustic aspects of the speech signal, perceptual processing and memory for speech and language, and processing syntactic and semantic information in sentence comprehension and lexical memory. A final paper reflects on selected themes of the conference and summarizes what the participants learned about the relation of basic research to areas of application.