The editorial discusses articles in this issue of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. The papers included in this issue cover the main areas of the speech and language sciences: phonetics, phonology, lexis, syntax and semantics. The work reported here underlines the importance of considering head stabilization in ultrasound studies. Lili Yeh, Bill Wells, Joy Stackhouse and Marcin Szczerbinski investigated phonological awareness in children acquiring Mandarin, especially of constituent parts of the syllable. However, as well as looking at the development of awareness, the authors were able to use their data to compare the merits of different models of the syllable in Mandarin. Marianne Lind and colleagues Hanna Simonsen, Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm, and Bjørn- Helge Mevik provide a lexical database for clinicians and clinical linguists working with Norwegian. Jodi Tommerdahl and Cynthia Kilpatrick describe a study of child directed speech. Their particular area of interest is test–retest reliability, and they looked at frequency of morphosyntactic productions in 17 mothers talking to their children. Yalda Kazemi, Thomas Klee and Helen Stringer examined language sample measures for Persian-speaking children and their diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing language impaired from normally developing speakers. The final paper in this issue is by Seung-yun Yan and Diane Sidtis and explores hemispheric specialization for common and proper nouns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)