The first paper in this issue involves research examining the perception of stuttering among adults living in Kuwait. The provision of speech and language therapy services is still relatively new in this country so the researchers were interested in sampling the attitudes of Arabs on the specific disorder of stuttering. The researchers found that the public perception of stuttering was generally favourable, although there were instances when negative attitudes regarding the perceived cause of stuttering were reported. The second paper presents data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children regarding language use and understanding among Australian children in the first five years of life. The study confirms the rich history of linguistic diversity in Australia, documenting that approximately 10–16% of young Australian children are speaking languages other than English, including Arabic, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
The next three papers in this issue focus on the physiological nature of cough and swallowing behavior. A person's inability to cough is closely linked to many neurological disorders and can be used as an indicator of risk for aspiration pneumonia. In the first of these papers, the researchers examined the reliability of speech-language therapists to judge the presence and strength of coughing behavior in hospitalized patients. In general, the therapists’ showed high agreement detecting the presence of coughing behavior, while judgments regarding the strength of cough were less reliable. The second paper concerning coughing behavior presents a normative data set for natural and suppressed coughing using nebulized citric acid to elicit a cough. The normative data should prove useful as a metric for detecting coughing difficulties in patients with neurological disorders. Normative data are also presented in the third paper. In this case, the data concern the pressure generated in the pharynx during various types of swallowing manoeuvres among healthy young and old adults.
The sixth paper in this issue explores the relationship between behavioral difficulties and language, literacy, and communication difficulties. The study was prompted by previous research suggesting that young people with speech, language, and communication difficulties have a propensity to encounter law offences. In this study, the language and literacy skills of a group of high school children identified with challenging classroom behaviors were compared with a control group. The researchers found significant association between the severity of an individual's behavior on a range of language and literacy measures. The final paper, examined the perceptual characteristics of speech dysarthria in Malayalam speakers. The study was motivated by limited research examining the ability to describe the perceptual characteristics of dysarthria in non-English groups, particularly languages that differ in rhythmic structure.
Finally, I would like to note that an erratum is published in this current issue of Speech, Language and Hearing. The errata concern attributions of authorship to three papers that were published in Volume 16 of the journal. In these three papers, errors in the assignment and ordering of authorship occurred. Attribution of authorship to these papers has now been corrected.