Bill Wells – författare

This is the third book in the series  “Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties” and is based on research and practice with school-age children with persisting speech and associated difficulties. It focuses on the psycholinguistic nature of their difficulties, how to design intervention programmes, and how intervention outcomes might be measured. It will serve as a practical handbook and will contain usefuls word lists, tips and photocopiable sheets in the appendix. Each chapter will summarise recent research findings and close with a bulleted summary of the main points in the chapter.Provides an explanation of the psycholinguistic approach and how to implement it, and integrate it with other approaches.Includes case studies

Children’s Intonation is a practical guide that focuses on the nature, causes and assessment of intonation problems for children and adolescents. Highlighting the importance of intonation for everyday conversational interaction and the implications of this for teaching and therapy contexts, this book addresses the following questions: How and when do children learn to use intonation for the purposes of interaction? As children get older, does intonation become more important or less important for communication?How might intonation be used to support or compensate for other aspects of language?What are the implications for practitioners, parents and caregivers when interacting with young children?Clinically oriented, this book explores these questions through case studies that cover a range of developmental communication difficulties including autism spectrum disorders, hearing impairment and specific speech and language difficulties.   It provides readers with a tool for profiling children’s intonation skills, a developmental phase model to explain typical and atypical intonation development, a psycholinguistic model of intonation processing, interactional perspectives on intonation use, and consideration of intonation in relation to both written and spoken language. It also includes acccess to a companion website with extra resources.

This book presents a systematic hypothesis testing approach to the assessment of speech processing skills in children, and is based on the popular courses run by the authors. The book aims to develop the knowledge and analytical skills of those who need to administer and evaluate assessment materials. Principles of psycholinguistic investigation are introduced through a series of activities relating to theoretical and practical issues. The book demonstrates through case studies how to profile and interpret a child's performance within a developmental psycholinguistic model. It will be of particular interest to practitioners, researchers and students in the following areas: speech and language therapy; education; clinical, educational and developmental psychology and child language and clinical linguistics.