Two narrative perspectives, high point analysis and episodic analysis, were used to compare the ability of narrators with and without learning disabilities to fulfill the referential and evaluative narrative functions. The participants were 82 students with learning disabilities and their typically achieving peers matched on age, grade, gender, and ethnicity. The participants (48 Caucasian, 34 African American) attended urban and suburban schools (Grades 4–7). Narratives were collected within the context of a naturalistic conversation. The findings across the two narrative perspectives showed areas of incongruence in specific narrative competencies. While these findings expand the portrayal of narrators with learning disabilities, they also imply the impact of using specific narrative analyses and genres for the narrative assessment and intervention outcomes.

The assignment of grammatical functions has been a key feature of hierarchical (serial) models of speech production since their inception in the 1970s. This article argues that grammatical function assignment is neither sufficient nor necessary in such models. It reports a study of the effects of the conceptual accessibility of referents on the selection of English dative syntactic frames in production and shows that the effects relate to linear precedence rather than grammatical function assignment. A secondary topic addressed in the same study is whether second language speakers of English have difficulty integrating syntactic knowledge where it interfaces with conceptual accessibility in speech production. Findings suggest that advanced proficiency speakers do not and are qualitatively similar to native speakers. The implications of this for the interface hypothesis about second language acquisition are discussed.

Two experiments successfully trained novices to categorize French nouns by grammatical gender, resulting in high levels of performance after delay. Training with a frequent exemplar and training with a more diverse exemplar set led to equivalent learning. However, providing explicit rules with correctness feedback led to better generalization and retention than did correctness feedback alone or feature focusing without explicit rule information. This suggests that, at least for some grammar tasks, explicit information about form–function mappings improves learning. Moreover, the advantage of rule instruction was robust to testing and training under time pressure. Thus, rule instruction may be helpful even when speeded performance is required, supporting the prediction that practice leads to proceduralization of declarative grammatical knowledge.

Previous studies have found that the early fitting of cochlear implants in children has beneficial effects on their expressive and receptive language. However, different ages are identified in different studies, and some studies present contradictory results. Starting from these observations, our study suggests that at least two additional factors play an important role in determining linguistic outcomes. The first is the area of language under investigation: lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The second factor is the typological features of the child's target language. Our study, which involved 33 Italian-speaking children who received a cochlear implant and 33 age and gender matched controls, reveals that lexical, semantic, pragmatic, and phonological knowledge are not particularly vulnerable in these children. By contrast, one area of morphosyntax (production of clitic pronouns) is especially challenging. In addition, an effect of age of implantation was found only in this morphosyntactic area. This is the first study on language development in Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants.

The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of “early” and “late” phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective.

This paper explores how theories on the relationship between language and domain-general cognitive capabilities might account for individual variation in second language learning. We investigated the acquisition of a morphophonological grammar paired with standardized tests of memory function. The language learned had simple and complex morphophonological patterns of word formation, which are hypothesized to correlate with standardized measures of procedural and declarative memory, respectively. The results show a significant amount of variation in learning success is accounted for by these measures of memory in accordance with the hypothesis. These findings help explain why some adults are able to learn a second language more easily than others while also advancing a model of second language learning motivated by linguistic theory.

A group of Finnish-speaking children with specific language impairment (N = 15, M age = 5 years, 2 months [5;2]), a group of same-age typically developing peers (N = 15, M age = 5;2), and a group of younger typically developing children (N = 15, M age = 3;8) were compared in their use of accusative, partitive, and genitive case noun suffixes. The children with specific language impairment were less accurate than both groups of typically developing children in case marking, suggesting that their difficulties with agreement extend to grammatical case. However, these children were also less accurate in making the phonological changes in the stem needed for suffixation. This second type of error suggests that problems in morphophonology may constitute a separate problem in Finnish specific language impairment.