The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.

This article presents a theoretical framework designed to accommodate core evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn the phonological forms of new words are closely linked. Basic findings relating nonword repetition and word learning both in typical samples of children and adults and in individuals with disorders of language learning are described. The theoretical analysis of this evidence is organized around the following claims: first, that nonword repetition and word learning both rely on phonological storage; second, that they are both multiply determined, constrained also by auditory, phonological, and speech–motor output processes; third, that a phonological storage deficit alone may not be sufficient to impair language learning to a substantial degree. It is concluded that word learning mediated by temporary phonological storage is a primitive learning mechanism that is particularly important in the early stages of acquiring a language, but remains available to support word learning across the life span.

The present study assessed reading difficulties and cognitive impairments of German-speaking dyslexic children at grade levels 2, 3, and 4. It was found that German dyslexic children suffered from a pervasive speed deficit for all types of reading tasks, including text, high frequency words, and pseudowords, but at the same time showed generally rather high reading accuracy. For pseudowords, reading refusals or word responses were absent, and the majority of errors was close to the target pronunciation. Reading speed seemed to be most impaired for pseudowords and function words that did not allow the children to take a short-cut from phonemically mediated word processing. The discussion offers a developmental framework for the interpretation of these reading difficulties. For the cognitive tasks, dyslexic children did not differ from age-matched control children on the pseudoword repetition task or the digit span task, indicating that auditory perception and memory were not impaired. On phonological awareness tasks (rhyme oddity detection, vowel substitution, and pseudoword spelling), dyslexic children scored lower than age-matched control children, but not lower than younger reading-level control children. The performance of the dyslexic children on the phonemic segmentation tasks (pseudoword spelling and vowel substitution) was high in absolute terms. In contrast, marked differences between dyslexic and age-matched controls were found on rapid naming tasks: dyslexic grade 4 children showed lower numeral-naming speed than reading-level grade 2 children. Numeral-naming speed turned out to be the most important predictor of reading speed differences. These findings are discussed in relation to the phonological impairment explanation of dyslexia and to recent alternative explanations that posit an underlying impairment in automatizing skills which demand the fast execution of low-level cognitive processes.

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a pair of widely used parent-report instruments for assessing communicative skills in infants and toddlers. This report describes short-form versions of the CDIs and their development, summarizes newly available normative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research and clinical applications. The infant short form (Level I, for 8- to 18-month-olds) contains an 89-word checklist for vocabulary comprehension and production. The two parallel versions of the toddler short form (Level II, Forms A and B, for 16- to 30-month-olds) each contain a 100-word vocabulary production checklist and a question about word combinations. The forms may also be useful with developmentally delayed children beyond the specified age ranges. Copies of the short forms and the normative tables appear in the appendices.

The bilingual child is seen as a unique source of information about the relation between input and intake. The strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning was examined for 25 simultaneous bilingual infants (ages 8 to 30 months) with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, standardized parent report forms in English and Spanish, the percentage of all words that were known in each language was calculated and then plotted against the estimates of language input (also in percentages). A significant correlation was found, r(25)= .82, p < .001. The correlation was also strong when examined point-by-point, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20%; between observations, although it was not reliable at lower levels of exposure to Spanish. Especially for children with less input in the minority language, the factors which appeared to affect the strength of the association between input and amount learned in a language are discussed.

Given the morphophonemic nature of the English orthography, surprisingly few studies have examined the roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading. This 4-year longitudinal study (Grades 2–5) compared these two factors in three aspects of reading development: pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and single word reading. Morphological awareness contributed significantly to pseudoword reading and reading comprehension, after controlling prior measures of reading ability, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and phonological awareness. This contribution was comparable to that of phonological awareness and remained 3 years after morphological awareness was assessed. In contrast, morphological awareness rarely contributed significantly to single word reading. We argue that these results provide evidence that morphological awareness has a wide-ranging role in reading development, one that extends beyond phonological awareness.

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home language use of a family consisting of at least one parent and one child between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The results show that the children in these families all spoke the majority language, but that minority language use was not universal. Differences in parental language input patterns used at home correlated with differences in child minority language use. Home input patterns where both parents used the minority language and where at most one parent spoke the majority language had a high chance of success. The “one parent–one language” strategy did not provide a necessary nor sufficient input condition. Implications for bilingual families are discussed.

A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.

Phonological recoding is commonly viewed as a back-up mechanism when word identification using the visual pathway fails. A second more important role for phonological recoding is as a self-teaching mechanism by which the child learns to identify words visually. Although phonological recoding may play a minor role in skilled adult reading, it plays a critical role in helping the child become a skilled reader. This article reviews the evidence relevant to these issues. The first section examines evidence on the role of phonological recoding in the development of word identification skills and reading comprehension. The next section reviews evidence showing that children with reading disabilities often have deficits in basic phonological processing skills. The third section deals with the nature of the reading problem in such children which, it is argued, is consistent with the proposed developmental analysis of the importance of phonological recoding in learning to read. The article concludes with a discussion of the teaching implications of these conclusions.

Second language speakers commonly acknowledge that taboo terms can be uttered with greater ease in their second language (L2) than in their first language (L1). To investigate this phenomenon psychophysiologically, 32 Turkish–English bilinguals rated a variety of stimuli for pleasantness in Turkish (L1) and English (L2) while skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes. Participants demonstrated greater autonomic arousal to taboo words and childhood reprimands (“Shame on you!”) in their L1 compared to their L2. This finding provides quantifiable support for the subjective experiences of L2 speakers.

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish–English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of “profile effects,” where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the “distributed characteristic” of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.

Theories of language learnability have focused on “normal” language development, but there is a group of children, termed “specifically language-impaired,” for whom these theories are also appropriate. These children present an interesting learnability problem because they develop language slowly, the intermediate points in their development differ in certain respects from the usual developmental stages, and they do not always achieve the adult level of language functioning. In this article, specifically language-impaired children are treated as normal learners dealing with an input that is distorted in principled ways. When the children are viewed from this perspective, Pinker's (1984) theory can account for many of the features of their language.

Three studies are reported that examine the development of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual children between kindergarten and Grade 2. In the first study, monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well on a complex task requiring phoneme substitution. The second study replicated these results and demonstrated a significant role for the language of literacy instruction. The third study extended the research by including two groups of bilingual children and a range of phonological awareness and reading tasks. Spanish–English bilinguals performed better than English-speaking monolinguals on a phoneme segmentation task, but Chinese–English bilinguals performed worse. Other measures of phonological awareness did not differ among the three groups. The results are discussed in terms of a limit on the effect that bilingualism exerts on metalinguistic development.

This study investigated the relationships between home language learning activities and vocabulary in a sample of monolingual native Dutch (n = 58) and bilingual immigrant Moroccan–Dutch (n = 46) and Turkish–Dutch (n = 55) 3-year-olds, speaking Tarifit-Berber, a nonscripted language, and Turkish as their first language (L1), respectively. Despite equal domain general cognitive abilities, Dutch children scored higher than the bilingual children on a L1 vocabulary test, and Moroccan–Dutch children had higher second language (L2) vocabulary skills compared to Turkish–Dutch children. Multigroup analyses revealed strong impact on both L1 and L2 skills of language specific input in literate and oral activities. Finally, indications were found of positive cross-language transfer from L1 to L2 as well as competition between L1 and L2 input.

Variation in mothers' child-directed speech and in their children's rates of language development were examined as a function of child birth order and family socioeconomic status (SES). A total of 63 children between 18 and 29 months were recorded in dyadic interaction with their mothers on two separate occasions, 10 weeks apart. The children included first and later boms who came from high-SES and mid-SES backgrounds. Analyses of the children's speech at the second visit showed that the first-bom children were more advanced in lexical and grammatical development than the later-bom children, and that the later-bom children were more advanced in the development of conversational skill. High-SES children showed more advanced lexical development than mid-SES children. These differences are interpreted as the result of differences in language learning experience associated with birth order and SES, some of which were in evidence in the mothers' speech recorded at the first visit. With respect to theories of language acquisition, these findings suggest that language experience plays a nontrivial role in language development, and that the nature of that role is different for different components of language development. With respect to general developmental consequences of birth order and SES, the findings indicate that differences in early language experience may set the stage for later developmental differences, but that when long-term and pervasive differences are observed, as is the case for SES-related differences in achievement, it is likely that there are pervasive and continuing differences in experience.

There is limited research regarding what levels of proficiency in each language should characterize the language behavior of bilingual children and the impact of language exposure or language use variables on bilingual performance. This study was designed to examine the extent to which years of exposure to a language(s), amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language(s) relate to observed bilingual performance in young children, as obtained from parent and teacher reports. A secondary goal was to determine the extent to which parents or teachers could assist in determining language status by examining relationships between their ratings of the child's use and proficiency in the two languages and the child's grammatical performance. Fifty-seven children and their families were sampled from second grade classes of a large school district serving primarily low-income families in southern California. Multiple regression analyses for each language indicated that amount of Spanish input at home was a significant predictor of grammatical performance in that language. These input effects did not hold for English. Although there were some crosslinguistic differences, parent and teacher ratings of use and proficiency correlated with the child's grammatical performance in the target language. The findings suggest that parent and teacher estimates may be useful to determine bilingual status.

The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigated: could native speakers of a nontone language learn the use of pitch patterns for lexical identification, and what effect did more basic auditory ability have on learning success. We found that all subjects improved to a certain degree, although large individual differences were observed. Learning success was found to be associated with the learners' ability to perceive pitch patterns in a nonlexical context and their previous musical experience. These results suggest the importance of a phonetic–phonological–lexical continuity in adult nonnative word learning, including phonological awareness and general auditory ability.

A neuropsychological theory is offered to account for the syndrome of Broca's aphasia. A critical review of the literature, with emphasis on recent research, provides the basis for a redefinition of the syndrome that considerably broadens its classical description. The argument is advanced that the focus of neuropsychological explanation should be on theoretically separable psychological mechanisms that might be disrupted in relative isolation from other components in conditions of focal brain damage, rather than on isolated units of aphasic performance. The symptoms that characterize Broca's aphasia are explained as predictable behavioral manifestations of a central disruption of the syntactic parsing component of the language System, coupled with a (theoretically independent) articulatory deficit that affects only the speech output System. The neuroanatomical implications of this argument are considered within the framework of the classical “strong localizationist” hypothesis.

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development.

The study examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Because native speakers of Arabic first learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking, it was hypothesized that the linguistic differences between the two varieties, the so-called diglossic variables, would interfere with the acquisition of basic reading processes in MSA. Two diglossic variables were examined: phoneme and word syllabic structure. The children's phoneme isolation and pseudoword decoding skills were tested. The results showed that both diglossic variables interfered with the children's performance of both tasks in both grades. The findings support the role of linguistic distance in the acquisition of basic reading processes in a diglossic context.