Tomblin received the Alfred K. Kawana Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publications from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in 2009 and ASHA Honors in 2010. He received the Callier Prize in Communication Disorders in 2011 for "remarkable advances in the epidemiology, etiology, assessment and treatment of children's language disorders." Tomblin has co-edited several books including Understanding Individual Differences in Language Development Across the School Years (with Marilyn Nippold), and Understanding Developmental Language Disorders: From Theory to Practice (with Courtenay Norbury and Dorothy V. M. Bishop).