Canadian children (n = 81; 9–13 years) who spoke both English and Italian were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. There was a significant relationship between English and Italian across all phonological tasks. The relationship was less evident for syntactic skills and was generally absent for working memory measures. Analyses of phonological, syntactic, and memory processes based on levels of skill in English reading showed significantly better performance by skilled readers compared to less skilled readers; this was also true for the 11- to 13-year-olds compared to the 9- to 10-year-olds. Similar results were obtained as a function of levels of skill in Italian reading. On all Italian tasks, the bilingual children lagged behind monolingual children matched on age. However, less skilled and skilled bilingual Italian children had significantly higher scores than monolingual English–Canadian children (with comparable reading skills) on English tasks involving reading, spelling, syntactic awareness, and working memory. The results suggest that English–Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing, but it may influence other linguistic modules. In addition, exposure to a language with more predictable grapheme–phoneme correspondences, such as Italian, may enhance phonological skills in English.

The two experiments reported here investigated the processing of English wh- questions by native speakers of English and advanced Chinese, German, and Korean learners of English as a second language. Performance was evaluated in relation to parsing strategies and sensitivity to plausibility constraints. In an on-line plausibility judgment task, both native and non-native speakers behaved in similar ways. All groups postulated a gap at the first position consistent with the grammar, as predicted by the filler-driven strategy and as shown by garden path or filled-gap effects that were induced when the hypothesized gap location turned out to be incorrect. In addition, all subjects interpreted the plausibility of the filler-gap dependency, as shown by a reduction in the garden path effect when the initial analysis was implausible. However, the native speakers' reading profiles showed evidence of a more immediate effect of plausibility than those of the non-native speakers, suggesting that they initiated reanalysis earlier when the first analysis was implausible. Experiment 2 showed that the non-native speakers had difficulty canceling a plausible gap hypothesis even in an off-line (pencil and paper) task, whereas for the native speakers there was no evidence that the sentences caused difficulty in this situation. The results suggest that native and non-native speakers employ similar strategies in immediate on-line processing and hence are garden-pathed in similar ways, but they differ in their ability to recover from misanalysis.

Focusing on mother–child verbal interactions in two different contexts, the present study examined whether differences in maternal conversational style could be explained by children's linguistic and conversational abilities and by the mothers' expressed attitudes to collectivism. To this end, 20 Estonian mothers were videotaped with their 6-year-old children during mealtime and puzzle solving, and they were asked to fill in a questionnaire on collectivistic attitudes. The results showed that the mothers' frequency of engaging children in conversation was not related to the children's linguistic and conversational abilities. The children talked more and spoke more complexly during puzzle solving. The context had a great influence on the maternal regulatory speech. Contrary to the expectations, mothers who scored higher in collectivism were not more directive; instead, they tended to be more talkative.

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children's own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children's own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters.

This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.

Two experiments investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. In Study I, 3- to 5-year-olds with typical language development were asked to extend novel verbs to new instances. They heard the verbs inflected with either -ed or -ing and were given a forced choice between events that maintained either the activity or the result of the original event. The younger children selected events according to the verb inflection: same-activity events for -ing and same-result events for -ed. Older preschoolers chose same-result events throughout. Study II was conducted to investigate the nature of this causal bias. A group of 4- to 5-year-olds with specific language impairment completed the same verb extension task. They were equivalent to the older Study I children in age and IQ but were at lower language levels than the younger group. Children in the SLI group used neither the inflectional strategy nor the same-result strategy. Findings from the two studies point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. The discussion focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional bootstrapping and the linguistic character of the same-result bias that replaces it.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

This workbook is a revised edition of the volume published in 1984 by Larry Selinker and Susan Gass entitled Workbook in Second Language Acquisition. Like the first edition, this edition provides a research-centered view of second language acquisition (SLA) that seeks to build an awareness of the issues, types of data, and methods of analysis through a series of practical problems of data analysis and related questions. The data and problems, which all focus on English as the target language, are drawn from articles published between 1968 and 1993, the majority of them “SLA classics” published in the 1980s. The book includes a short glossary and has accompanying tape-recorded material not provided to the reviewer.

The study of gesture, especially its relationship to spoken and signed languages, has become a broadly studied topic for researchers from various fields, including neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, human development, and communication disorders. One possible reason for the wide interest in gesture is its universality. People of all ages and cultures use gestures for various purposes. Young language-learning, hearing children often use gestures alone or in combination with speech to help express themselves to their interlocutors, for example, pointing to a desired object while saying “mine.” As a more striking example, deaf children in Nicaragua who had previously been unexposed to any conventional sign language, used gestures to develop home-sign systems that eventually developed into Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). On the other hand, gestures are often used in situations where the underlying purpose of the gesture is less clear. For example, people who are blind from birth are nonetheless found to gesture in conversation (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1997), and adults gesture frequently, and often subconsciously, during conversations with one another. Despite their omnipresence, we know relatively little about gestures' origins, their relationship to language, and, in some instances, the purposes they serve.

Examining the language abilities of children with language disorders should be a deductive process, using much more than the data that formal measures provide. The assessment should be a systematic, psycholinguistic exploration of aspects of a child's input and output, with a focus on the attempt to pinpoint specific areas of deficit within the language-processing system. Chiat, in this insightful and extremely accessible book, provides basic profiles of children with language disorders, along with case study examples, that both illustrate various forms of language disorder and demonstrate the use of tasks, commonly applied in psycholinguistic research, to problem-solve specific cases. Chiat is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at City University, London, where she is an established researcher who focuses primarily on phonological development and disorders and the impact of impaired phonology on lexical/semantic development.