Background
Description tasks are used to evaluate and investigate the production abilities of people with language impairments such as aphasia.

Aims
The goal of the present study is to investigate the production abilities of Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia (IWA), as well as a smaller sample of individuals with cognitive impairment (IWCI), in comparison with those of healthy controls. A second goal is to evaluate whether the scoring system of the Catalan version of the CAT (CAT-CAT) is helpful to discriminate different patterns of language impairment.

Methods and procedure
In the study, 109 control subjects, 20 IWA and 4 IWCI were asked to orally describe a picture from the CAT-CAT. The scoring method consisted in a closed-rating system that evaluates productivity, discourse efficiency, fluency, grammatical complexity and grammaticality.

Results
The results show that the overall scores of the control subjects were significantly higher than those of the experimental groups; the difference between the two experimental groups was not significant. Yet, the group of IWA showed greater intersubject variability than the group of IWCI. Also, the IWA were consistently worse in fluency, grammaticality and grammatical complexity than the IWCI, which indicated a different pattern of performance between the two groups.

Conclusions
Our findings therefore show that the oral picture description of the CAT-CAT is sensitive to the language impairment of subjects with aphasia and cognitive impairment. Moreover, the rating system put forward allows us to uncover different patterns of language impairment, since it includes variables to evaluate separately content and discourse efficiency on the one hand, and grammatical features on the other hand.

This paper addresses the underexplored realm of early parameter setting in language acquisition before the two-word stage, in a less researched language, Palestinian Arabic. Building on Franck et al.’s (2013) exploration of the verb–direct or indirect object/direct or indirect object–verb (VO/OV) parameter in infants exposed to French, we investigate the acquisition of the VO order (as opposed to OV) in 17-month-old native Palestinian Arabic infants using a combination of the preferential looking paradigm, the weird word order paradigm, and pseudo-verbs. The results from our study show that Palestinian Arabic infants have established VO by the age of 1;5 and ignore sequences of ungrammatical OV. This pattern is different from that of the adults, who do not ignore ungrammatical sequences. Additionally, we find no correlation between the infants’ performance and vocabulary size or age within the range tested. The infants in the study constitute, with Mandarin infants in a similar study, the youngest age group to show sensitivity to the VO/OV contrast.