The present volume, Advances in applied psycholinguistics: disorders of first-language development, and its companion volume, Advances in applied psycholinguistics: reading, writing, and language learning, are part of the series entitled Cambridge Monographs and Texts in Applied Psycholinguistics, which began with the publication in 1983 of Ann M. Peters's The units of language acquisition. The general aim of this series is to bring together work from all of the subfields of applied psycholinguistics by authors who approach applied problems from the vantage point of basic research and theory in psycholinguistics and related areas of cognitive psychology. The aim of the present Advances is to make available high-level up-to-date reviews of research, theory, and practice in the two major areas of applied psycholinguistics: (1) disorders of first-language development and (2) reading, writing, and language learning, with each review focusing, wherever possible, on the published and ongoing work of its author or authors. Thus, the Advances should help researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners in the many areas of applied psycholinguistics – from fields such as psychology, speech-hearing-language sciences and pathology, applied linguistics, educational psychology, special education, neurology, psychiatry, foreign-language teaching, and English composition – keep abreast of major developments in their areas of interest.

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