Abstract
Interlanguage is a concept that is manifest in any trajectory of language change in a learner: typical first language, second language or language disorder. To understand those trajectories we need a rich psychological model of what creates them. This paper applies one such model–Sharwood Smith and Truscott’s Modular On-Line Growth and Use of Language model (MOGUL)–to childhood developmental language disorders, and suggests that the model’s components of language processing and their interaction shed significant light on why children with a wide range of different language disorders exhibit the language behaviours that are the characteristic of their diagnoses. Following a brief summary of the MOGUL model, the paper explores the impact on language development of differences in sensori-motor input, in the functioning of the various modules and the interfaces between them, and in the storage and activation of memory. Like Relevance Theory, with which the paper makes a direct connection, MOGUL encourages one to take a view of developmental language disorder as emerging from the same set of psychological resources as typical development (first or second) but as being the result of adjustments to, or compensations for, differences in how the various modules function and connect with each other.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Mike Sharwood Smith for feedback on my summary of MOGUL; and to Jan Murphy and Anne van Bysterveldt for feedback on the clinical aspects of this paper.
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