Brain, Cognition and Language: Current Issues in Child Language

disorders exhibiting social communication disorders as defined by the DSM-5 [2] also experience deficits in ToM. Westby reviews cognitive, affective, interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of ToM and recommends that ToM profiles be constructed for a variety of clients in order to develop and implement effective intervention strategies. In ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (children’s version): a comparison between children with typical development, children with high-functioning autism and typically developed adults’, Vogindroukas et al. [3] translated the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (by BaronCohen et al. [4] ), adapted it for the Greek population and then conducted an assessment of 3 groups of participants. The authors examined the qualitative and quantitative performance differences among participating populations in this study. Segal et al. [5] contributed the article ‘Judging emotions in lexical-prosodic congruent and incongruent speech stimuli in adolescents on the autism spectrum’. In this study, the authors assessed the ability of adolescents in Israel who were diagnosed with autism to determine the emotional state of a speaker when prosody was congruent with the lexical condition compared to when prosody was incongruent with the lexical content. In the article ‘Executive dysfunctions, reading disabilities and speech-language pathology evaluation’, Hus [6] This special issue of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica was developed by the Child Language Committee of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics to address two of its responsibilities: to stimulate evidence-based practice and research related to language acquisition and its impairments exhibited by a range of populations across various contexts, and to collaborate with the editor of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics in the expansion of language topics published in the journal. The articles in this issue examine relationships among the brain, cognition and language. Scholars from various parts of the world – Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, New Zealand and the USA – contributed articles that address the neurodevelopmental and cognitive underpinnings of language for typically developing children and adolescents, late talkers, and those who have language impairments resulting from diverse etiologies, such as autism and Down syndrome. Each article addresses the implications that these underlying skills have for providing assessment and intervention services to children and adolescents with language impairments. In the article ‘Social neuroscience and theory of mind’, Westby [1] discusses how deficits in theory of mind (ToM) are not limited to those with autism. Persons with a variety of communication, behavioral and psychiatric Published online: November 14, 2014