ABSTRACT
Introduction: why build models of developmental disorders? A 6-year-old child is given a vocabulary test where he has to name pictures of objects. He scores poorly, and makes mistakes such as naming a picture of a guitar as a ‘piano’. One explanation of the child’s difficulty is that he has impoverished semantic (meaning) representations. Another child has problems reading words out loud, especially new words that she has not seen before. For example, she reads the novel word ‘slear’ as ‘sear’. One explanation of her difficulty is that she has poorly specified phonological (speech sound) representations. What do these terms ‘impoverished’ and ‘poorly specified’ mean? How did the mental representations of meaning and speech sounds get this way? If a speech and language therapist or a specialist teacher wanted to intervene to remediate these problems, what intervention would be appropriate, and at what age? Should it be a different intervention if representations are impoverished versus poorly specified?
