Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior is a collection of papers that discusses differences at the center of the study of language, specifically, on the various dimensions of linguistic ability and behavior along which individuals can differ from each other. Papers also review the development of techniques that measure these dimensions in relation to biological, psychological, and cultural parameters. Some papers review individual differences in language study in terms of different perspectives: that of a psychometrician's, of an individualistic's vantage point, and of a psycholinguistic's. Other papers discuss how each individual accesses, uses, and judges his language through fluency, biases, spatial principles, or a linguistic-phonetic mode. Several papers examine individual differences in language acquisition, such as "profile analysis," strategies in acquisition of sounds, second language learning, and duplication of adult language system. A group of papers addresses the biological aspects of language variation. These biological aspects include selective disorders of syntax (agrammatism), selective disorders of lexical retrieval (anomia), and cerebral lateralization effects in language processing. Certain papers explain individual differences in languages using sociolinguistic analysis. The collection is well suited for linguists, ethnologists, psychologists, and researchers whose works involve linguistics, learning, communications, and syntax.

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This volume presents the findings of a large-scale study of individual differences in spoken (and heard) language development during the school years. The goal of the study was to investigate the degree to which language abilities at school entry were stable over time and influential in the child’s overall success in important aspects of development. The methodology was a longitudinal study of over 600 children in the US Midwest during a 10-year period. The language skills of these children -- along with reading, academic, and psychosocial outcomes -- were measured. There was intentional oversampling of children with poor language ability without being associated with other developmental or sensory disorders. Furthermore, these children could be sub-grouped based on their nonverbal abilities, such that one group represents children with specific language impairment (SLI), and the other group with nonspecific language impairment (NLI) represents poor language along with depressed nonverbal abilities. Throughout the book, the authors consider whether these distinctions are supported by evidence obtained in this study and which aspects of development are impacted by poor language ability. Data are provided that allow conclusions to be made regarding the level of risk associated with different degrees of poor language and whether this risk should be viewed as lying on a continuum. The volume will appeal to researchers and professionals with an interest in children’s language development, particularly those working with children who have a range of language impairments. This includes Speech and Language Pathologists; Child Neuropsychologists; Clinical Psychologists working in Education, as well as Psycholinguists and Developmental Psychologists.

The scope of individual learner differences is broad, yet there is no current, comprehensive, and unified volume that provides an overview of the considerable amount of research conducted on various language learner differences, until now.

Understanding the way in which learners differ from one another is of fundamental concern to those involved in second-language acquisition, either as researchers or teachers. This account is the first to review at book length the important research into differences, considering matters such as aptitude, motivation, learner strategies, personality and interaction between learner characteristics and types of instruction.