Because the Japanese phonetic script (i.e., kana) represents moraic units, it is often claimed that Japanese people assemble phonology at the moraic unit. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the unit for naming visually presented stimuli, focusing on the special nasals /N/, geminates /Q/, long vowels /R/, and dual vowels /J/. The special sounds create two morae when there is only one syllable. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the production of three-mora, three-syllable and three-mora, two-syllable real, and nonsense words. The findings indicated that native Japanese speakers named the three-mora words containing the special sounds more quickly. Accordingly, it is posited that special sounds are named as syllable units rather than moraic units.

Fifteen children with specific language impairment (SLI) were matched in gender, age, and nonverbal mental age to one comparison group and in gender and standardized expressive language age to another comparison group. Their spontaneous speech was recorded while they narrated a cartoon and described their classroom. No group differences were found in mean length of utterance in morphemes or in syntactic complexity. SLI children had a lower percentage of correct irregular past tense forms but were equivalent to controls on regular past tense forms and noun plurals. Lexical diversity in terms of the number of different verbs expressed in the past tense and the number of different nouns pluralized did not differ. Some problems in generating complex sentences were found in the speech of SLI children. The importance of task constraints is stressed in explaining the discrepant performance of SLI children on spontaneous versus standardized measures of language, as well as the contribution of auditory memory limitations.Editor's Note: This article was reviewed and accepted by the previous Editor in Chief, Dr. John Locke.

Three input variables were manipulated during a story-viewing task to examine the word learning abilities of children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). The variables were presentation rate, sentence complexity, and word type. Fifty-four children participated: 18 were identified as SLI and 36 served as normally developing age-matched or language-matched controls. The stimuli involved a videotaped reading of two stories that had novel words embedded in the narrative, and word learning was measured by examining the children's ability to infer the meanings of the novel words from the story viewing context. A picture pointing task and a real word synonym task served as comprehension probes. A nonword repetition task and a battery of language tests were also administered. Two of the three input manipulations affected the children's scores. Across both probes, word type resulted in a main effect, with children from all three groups earning higher scores for verbs than nouns. On the picture pointing probe, presentation rate interacted with group. The interaction reflected lower scores in the fast rate than the slow rate for the children with SLI but not for the controls. Children's nonword repetition scores and standardized tests of vocabulary and syntax were moderately correlated with each other, and together these variables accounted for significant variation in the children's story viewing scores even after age, IQ, and articulation ability were controlled. The vocabulary and syntax tests contributed unique variance whereas nonword repetition contributed shared variance.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are a useful first language (L1) comparison group for second language (L2) children in order to determine whether target-deviant structures in interlanguage are developmental or due to transfer from the L1. Children with SLI could make a useful comparison group for child L2 learners because, unlike very young L1 learners, children with SLI have both incomplete abilities in the target language and the same cognitive and mental maturity as their age mates acquiring an L2. We examined the use of direct object clitics by English-L1/French-L2 learners and monolingual French-speaking children with SLI. Transfer from English might be expected for object pronominalization in French L2 interlanguage because the two languages have contrastive systems for this aspect of grammar. The use of direct object clitics in contexts in spontaneous speech where object pronominalization would be permissible was examined. The results showed that both the L2 and SLI children supplied clitics in permissible contexts at the same rate (approximately 40%), which was lower than that of monolingual, normally developing French-speaking children who were either age-matched (7 years old) or language-matched according to mean length of utterance in words (3 years old) with the L2–SLI children. Although there appeared to be some role of L1 transfer in the relative distribution of nonclitic object types in clitic-permissible contexts, the similarities between the SLI and L2 children suggest that target-deviant structures involving direct object pronominalization are a developmental phenomenon in child French across learner contexts. The results also suggest that for acquisition of some target-deviant structures, there can be greater similarities between L2 and SLI children than between L2 and younger L1 children.

This study explores growth in Chinese children's narrative over a 9-month period. Sixteen children (eight boys, eight girls) living in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in this project. The children were visited in the home at ages 3 years 6 months (3;6), 3;9, 4;0, and 4;3 and were prompted to tell personally experienced narratives at each visit. Three dimensions of the child's narrative skills (narrative structure, evaluation, and temporality) were assessed from an individual growth modeling perspective. The results of this study suggest that Chinese children, generally speaking, include more narrative components, evaluative information, and temporal markers in their narratives over time. However, the growth patterns and rates of change for each child on each narrative measure vary.

This paper reports on an experiment investigating the acquisition of Spanish, a language that has a gender feature for nouns and gender agreement for determiners and adjectives, by speakers of a first language (L1) that also has gender (French), as well as an L1 that does not (English). Number (present in all three languages) is also investigated. Subjects were adult learners of Spanish, at three levels of proficiency, as well as a control group of native speakers. Oral production data were elicited. Subjects were also tested on an interpretation task, in which the selection of pictures corresponding to particular sentences depends on number and gender contrasts. The results from both tasks show significant effects for proficiency; low proficiency groups differ significantly from native speakers, but advanced and intermediate groups do not. There were no significant effects for L1 or for prior exposure to another second language with gender. The findings are discussed in the context of two different theories as to the possibility of parameter resetting in nonnative acquisition, namely, the failed functional features hypothesis and the full transfer full access hypothesis. The results are consistent with the latter hypothesis.

A total of 130 young adults and 173 older adults gave goodness of fit ratings for sets of word alternatives for 123 English sentence frames. Word alternatives were semantically plausible in all cases but varied in the likelihood of their occurrence within the sentence frames. Adding support to the general belief that vocabulary and language knowledge are well preserved in normal aging, our results showed generally high agreement in goodness of fit ratings by the young and older adults. Differences that did occur appeared to be due to cohort differences in word usage and interests rather than underlying cognitive function. We suggest that this similarity in semantic judgments may help to explain why adult age differences in comprehension and memory for sentences are generally smaller than age differences for other examples of episodic memory.