Most of us work awfully hard to try to ensure that the treatment we provide to our clients, and the methods we teach our students to use for clinical intervention, are theoretically sound, are empirically tested, are efficacious. We tryto be objective. Our clinical experience, however, leads us to logical approaches that may be more subjective and not so well documented. How long do we wait to include a particular procedure in our treatment paradigm? How much data is necessary to say to ourselves, “Yes, this approach is sound. It can be used effectively.” These issues, among others, come into play in this issue’s Second Opinion. Biklen and Calculator present their views and retorts regarding a method of treatment that is growing in popularity daily, facilitated communication. And McLean offers a thought-provoking synthesis of their views in conclusion.

As clinicians we must also try to critically evaluate programs that are marketed for intervention purposes. Though many programs are available, few have data that indicate their effectiveness. For our Tutorial, Nippold, Schwartz, and Lewis offer evaluations of software programs designed for intervention in figurative language skills. They also offer suggestions for how to proceed with independent program evaluations in our daily practices.

In the child language assessment arena, we are often concerned with a child’s relational word comprehension. Yet factors other than semantic understanding may bias the results we obtain. In the Clinical Focus section, Edmonston and Thane provide interesting insights into how a given child’s comprehension strategies may affect our findings and how we can include these strategies as we assess children for comprehension of relational words.

Quality-of-life issues are the focus of two of this issue’s Research articles. Parents who have just been informed that their child has SLI often ask if the child will “outgrow it with time.” In their article, Records, Tomblin, and Freese offer the first empirical data from which to answer just such a question. And, in their work, Blood, Luther, and Stemple sought to determine how well individuals who have undergone laryngectomies adjust to and cope with their cancer, whether the type of alaryngeal voice and/or time post-onset have an effect on adjustment, and how perceptions of remediation efforts may affect adjustment. Their findings are particularly relevant for clinicians concerned with planning treatment protocols for these patients.

In yet another Research article, Bleile compares his findings of teachers’ judgments of what constitutes a “speech” problem in African American preschoolers with those judgments made by speech-language pathologists. And in a related vein, Terrell and Hale, in the Viewpoint column, describe an early education program designed with the unique learning styles of African American children in mind. Finally, continuing with a multicultural perspective, Hegde takes us for a visit to the national convention of the Indian Speech and Hearing Association in New Delhi for our World View column.

If you’ve been wondering if/when automatic fluency should ever be a goal for intervention with clients who stutter (as some of our readers have), you’re going to find Perkins’ response in Clinical Consult quite enlightening. And a new feature appears in this issue, Abstracts, designed to bring to your attention journal articles, chapters, or books that seem to have particular relevance to clinical practice. If you find some reading of resources out of the mainstream of our field particularly interesting, send an abstract to me for consideration. As you will see in this issue, the initials of the associate editors appear by those abstracts that they have individually compiled; however, the names and affiliations of all others will appear.

Although our Letters to the Editor section will not appear until the next issue, we have been overwhelmed with the positive nature of your many responses to the Journal. More recently, some have arrived in which those writing take issue with the articles appearing in the inaugural issue. Look for these, and their responses, in future issues. Thanks so much to those of you who have taken the time to write to express your views. We look forward to more letters from our readers in the future.