The Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders held its first meeting in June of 1980 featuring a Keynote address by David Crystal and 14 contributed papers. The Symposium was designed to provide a forum for sharing recent research and promoting interaction among established scholars and students in child language disorders. This meeting has grown dramatically over the past years and now offers a blend of invited plenary presentations by distinguished researchers on theoretical advances and programmatic research summaries. In addition we host dynamic panel discussions and the presentation of numerous contributed papers. Our current format features a pre-conference tutorial for students, five to seven invited plenary talks and more than 100 posters over a two and a half day period. The meeting has been regularly attended by more than 240 researchers and students from 40 states and 12 different countries.

The SRCLD has always fostered student participation locally and nationally. Locally, the symposium is organized by a Program Committee of doctorial students on the UW-Madison campus from several different departments. This committee participates in the selection of the invited speakers and reviews all of the submitted papers using a blind review process to select those to be presented at the meeting. National and international student participation at SRLCD is encouraged by providing student travel awards. In recent years more than 30 students received travel awards to present their research at the meeting.

The success of this meeting can be attributed to several things including presentation of outstanding science, opportunities for student participation on an equal level with established researchers, ample opportunity for informal discussion, an outstanding conference facility www.mononaterrace.com, and support from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders and the National Institutes on Child Health and Human Development.

Guidance is provided by the Local Advisory Committee of University of Wisconsin scholars, and the National Advisory Board provides national and international input for long term development.