Children in the United States and in other English-speaking countries often learn a good deal about letters before they begin formal reading instruction. We suggest that one important and previously unrecognized type of knowledge about letters is knowledge of the phonological structure of the letters' names. In two experiments, preschoolers with a mean age of 4;8 judged whether various syllables were letters. The children made significantly more false positive responses to syllables such as /fi/, which have a phonological structure shared by a number of letters, than to syllables such as /fa/ and /if/, which sound less like real letters. This was true even for children who could recite the alphabet without error. Learning the alphabet, we conclude, forms the basis for generalizations about the structure of letter names.

In American Sign Language (ASL), in addition to manual signs, specific nonmanual behaviors play a crucial role in the grammar of the language. For example, conditionals and relative clauses are signaled by obligatory nonmanual markers. This study focuses on the acquisition of negation in ASL, which is signaled by manual signs as well as an obligatory headshake. In particular, we address the developmental relationship between the communicative and grammatical (or linguistic) headshakes for negation. Study 1 includes naturalistic data from a cross-sectional sample of 51 deaf children, ranging in age from 1: 0 to 4: 11, who are acquiring ASL as their primary language. Study 2 includes longitudinal data from 16 of these children.

In this study, Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals used brief English contexts to choose among possible meanings for unfamiliar words. Two types of errors were compared: transfer errors, which were answers consistent with Spanish, but not English, syntax, and nontransfer errors, which were inconsistent with the syntax of both languages. Nontransfer errors were found to be negatively correlated with reading proficiency in both Spanish and English. Transfer errors, on the other hand, were positively correlated with reading proficiency in Spanish and were unrelated to reading proficiency in English.

Transcriptions of 17 hours of recordings of babbling by fraternal twins in an English/Serbian language environment (1,454 utterances) were analyzed for basic aspects of articulatory organization, effects of the “twin situation,” and effects of the two ambient languages, English and Serbian. Predictions that babbling would be dominated by a “frame” provided by rhythmic mandibular oscillation were, for the most part, confirmed in the form of consonant-vowel co-occurrence constraints showing little active intersegmental tongue movement (one subject) and a predominance of “vertical” (mandible-induced) intersyllabic variegation (both subjects). A possible effect of the twin situation was observed in the form of unusually high frequencies of the consonants and vowels most frequent in babbling. The only prominent ambient language effect was a relatively high frequency of palatal glides (palatals are common in Serbian).

This study compared vocal features of deception that can be measured by acoustic equipment with vocal features of deception that can be measured perceptually by human coders. As deception researchers have traditionally measured vocal behavior with either acoustic or perceptual methods (but not both), it is uncertain what correspondence, if any, exists between these methods. This study attempted to determine the degree of this correspondence. Deceptive interactions from an earlier study (Burgoon, Buller, Ebesu, & Rockwell, 1994) were used to conduct a detailed analysis of the vocal features of deceptive speech. The vocal samples were analyzed perceptually and acoustically. Results indicated moderate correlations between some acoustic and perceptual variables; neither measurement type, however, proved conclusively superior to the other in discriminating between truth and deception.

The central hypothesis of this study was that phonological mediation plays a critical role in the early development of reading and spelling in French. Therefore, the phonological structure of items, as opposed to their visual characteristics, was expected to be a significant determinant of performance. This hypothesis was tested in a short-term longitudinal study with a group of first graders (N = 57) who were administered a reading and a spelling task involving pseudowords of different syllabic structures. The first prediction was that there would be better performance on pseudowords with a simple structure (CVCVCV) than on pseudowords with a complex structure (CCVCVC or CVCCVC), and that errors on syllables with a complex structure would involve the deletion of codas or the simplification of complex onsets. We also predicted that errors would be consistent with a sonority hierarchy; for example, we expected more deletions of liquids than obstruents in clusters.

The case of a 7-year-old boy (Michael) with severe word-finding difficulties is presented. In an attempt to investigate the cause of these difficulties, a series of theoretically motivated questions was used as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation. A range of tasks was administered, including word association, semantic knowledge, auditory discrimination, auditory lexical decision, naming, and real word and nonword repetition. Michael's performance on the tasks was compared with that of controls matched in terms of chronological and vocabulary age. Results revealed significant differences between Michael's performance and that of the control groups. Although he showed no apparent semantic deficit, he did show pervasive deficits in phonological processing.