This study aimed to identify factors that contribute to bilingual children's decontextualized language production and investigate how schooling experience and bilingualism affect the development of this skill. The word definition skills of seventy Korean–English bilingual children whose first language was Korean, yet who had been schooled in English, were analyzed. The findings indicate that contrary to the results from previous studies, the participants' decontextualized language production was much better in their home language than in their school language, when considering both the formal linguistic structure and the communicative adequacy of their word definitions. In addition, limited cross-language transfer across tasks was present and cross-language contribution was observed only in the children's ability to achieve communicative adequacy, but not in their ability to construct conventional definition syntax. The results are discussed in terms of the linguistic and typological distance between the two languages and the potential effects of language-learning contexts.

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb's syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]–14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used cohesive devices in narratives similarly to mentally matched children, but their performance differed from the chronologically matched children only for referential cohesion. WS children's grammatical error rates were similar to both the mentally and chronologically matched children. Implications for the characterization of the language profile of individuals with WS and considerations for the focus of future narrative research are discussed.

Spoken word recognition, during gating, appears intact in specific language impairment (SLI). This study used gating to investigate the process in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders plus language impairment (ALI). Adolescents with ALI, SLI, and typical language development (TLD), matched on nonverbal IQ listened to gated words that varied in frequency (low/high) and number of phonological onset neighbors (low/high density). Adolescents with ALI required more speech input to initially identify low-frequency words with low competitor density than those with SLI and those with TLD, who did not differ. These differences may be due to less well specified word form representations in ALI.

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, because her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head–complement order, differentiating verb–object and object–verb languages, is represented very early on in an abstract, rulelike format. In contrast, constructivist theories assume that it is initially encoded as lexicalized, verb-specific knowledge. In order to address this issue experimentally, we combined the preferential looking paradigm using pseudoverbs with the weird word order paradigm adapted to comprehension. The results, based on highly reliable, coder-independent eye-tracking measures, provide the first direct evidence that as early as 19 months French-speaking infants have an abstract representation of the word order of their language.

This study presents findings on patterns of communication between internationally adopted children and their mothers in order to better understand the nature of these interactions and their influence on language learning. We examined maternal language use and joint attention behaviors of mothers and their children in 21 mother–child pairs: 10 pairs included children adopted from China living in francophone families, and 11 included francophone children living with their biological families; all were matched for socioeconomic status, sex, and age. The children were, on average, 15 months of age at initial testing when they were video-taped with their mothers for purposes of describing the mothers’ language use and the mothers’ and children's joint attention behaviors. Vocabulary development was assessed at 15 and again at 20 months of age using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The results support the conclusion that adoptive mothers play an active role in promoting and maintaining joint attention and that the redirecting style they used the most and that correlated with their children's later vocabulary development contrasts with the following style that correlates with vocabulary development in nonadopted children raised in mainstream North American families.

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target language from birth (monolinguals, L1 attriters) with late L2 learners, on the one hand, and bilinguals (L1 attriters, L2ers) with monolinguals, on the other hand, allowed us to disentangle the impacts of age of onset and bilingualism in speech production. At the group level, the attriters performed indistinguishably from controls, and both differed from the L2 group. However, 80% of all L2ers scored within the native (attriter) range. Correlational analyses with background factors further found some effects of use and language aptitude. These results show that acquiring a language from birth is not sufficient to guarantee nativelike pronunciation, and late acquisition does not necessarily prevent it. The results are discussed in the light of models on the role of age and cross-linguistic influence in L2 acquisition.

Two studies explored the relation between listening comprehension of text and listening comprehension of sentences in preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years, 11 months. The first study analyzed this relationship taking into account the role of lower level components, namely, word knowledge and verbal working memory, as possible mediators. These components specifically accounted for listening text comprehension, whereas sentence comprehension did not. Given that sentences forming a text are not processed in isolation but in context, the second study explored the role of the ability to use linguistic context, a higher level component, in listening comprehension of text and sentences. Listening sentence comprehension was facilitated by the use of context, which accounted for individual differences in listening text comprehension. Overall, results showed that listening text comprehension is related to lower level as well as higher level components, whereas listening sentence comprehension does not play a specific role.

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