This longitudinal study investigates the distribution of null and overt subjects in the spontaneous production of six Italian-speaking children between the ages of 1 year, 7 months and 3 years, 3 months. Like their peers acquiring other Romance null-subject languages, the children in this sample produced more overt subjects as their mean length of utterance in words (MLUW) increased. Pronominal subjects, and specifically first person pronouns, accounted for an increasingly larger proportion of the overt subjects used. The distribution of both pronominal and lexical subjects was further investigated as a function of the informativeness value of a number of pragmatically relevant features. The results showed that as early as MLUW 2.0 Italian-speaking children can use null and overt subjects in a pragmatically appropriate way. The relevance of these findings is discussed with reference to performance limitation and syntactic accounts of subject omission, and implications are drawn for a model of language development that incorporates the mastery of pragmatics in the acquisition of syntax.

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students’ ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that words ending in -ty in English often have a Spanish cognate ending in -dad). A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students’ ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and English. There was also marked growth in the students’ knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes. Students recognized cognate stems of suffixed words more easily than noncognate stems, suggesting that, in closely related languages such as Spanish and English, cross-language transfer may play a role, not just in recognizing individual words, but also in the learning of derivational morphology.

Chinese script is often viewed as an exception to the processes of language learning in that it is presumed to be learned by rote. However, recent psycholinguistic investigations describing the formal and functional constraints of Chinese script have offered a new direction for a cognitive analysis of its acquisition. We investigated children's understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in a task of judgment of orthographic acceptability and a creative spelling task. The formal constraint we examined was the fixed position of stroke patterns and their function as either a semantic radical (giving a clue to meaning) or a phonological component (giving a clue to pronunciation). The children (aged 4 to 9) attended either kindergarten or primary school in Hong Kong. Our results indicated that 6-year-olds could already use the positional rule to reject nonwords (which violate the formal constraint of position) as unacceptable, whereas pseudowords (which do not violate this constraint) were judged as acceptable. Significant effects of age and orthographic acceptability were observed. The task of creative writing replicated this trend and showed that, from age 6, the children were able to use semantic radicals to represent meaning. However, a more systematic use of phonological components as a clue to pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds. We conclude that learning to read and write in Chinese is not simply accomplished by the rote memorization of individual characters: rather, as children progress in learning, they develop an understanding of the underlying rules of written Chinese.

The objective of this research was to compare child second language (L2) learners and children with specific language impairment (SLI) on both production and comprehension in order to investigate whether the similarity of their error profiles observed in spontaneous production extends to comprehension. Results are presented from an elicited production and a sentence–picture matching task targeting accusative object clitics in French. As groups, both L2 learners and children with SLI show a low rate of clitic suppliance in production, yet perform well on the comprehension task. No statistically significant differences are found between the two groups on either task. Analyses of individual results, however, reveal diversity within both groups. Although there seems to be a correlation between performance in production and comprehension in the L2 group, this is not the case in the SLI group.

Grammatical specific language impairment (G-SLI) has been proposed as a distinct subtype of language impairment. We assessed a large sample of twins between the ages of 7 and 13 years on language comprehension tests sensitive to G-SLI. The sample included 37 same-sex twin pairs selected for the presence of language impairment (LI) in one or both twins and 104 twin pairs from the general population. The number and patterns of errors in those with LI replicated findings from previous studies of G-SLI. Qualitative markers of G-SLI were derived from the tests. Out of 144 children for whom complete data were available, 2 scored positive on all five markers and 9 scored positive on four of the five markers. Most children who made grammatical errors characteristic of G-SLI had co-occurring deficits in other areas. These results raise questions for theories that treat this disorder as an all-or-none modular deficit.

We examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence–picture matching tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term memory (STM) skills and their relation to sentence comprehension performance were also examined. When WM load was minimized, the LI group performed more poorly on the sentence comprehension task compared to the age-matched control group and the dyslexic group. Across groups, sentence comprehension performance generally decreased as the WM load increased, but this effect was somewhat more pronounced in the dyslexic group compared to the age-matched group. Moreover, both the LI and dyslexic groups showed poor phonological STM compared to the age-matched control group, and a significant correlation was observed between phonological STM and sentence comprehension performance under demanding WM loads. The results indicate subtle sentence processing difficulties in dyslexia that might be explained as resulting from these children's phonological STM limitations.

Comprehension of six syntactic structures was tested across four age groups. Each structure was presented with both plausible and implausible content. The contribution of cognitive nonlinguistic factors important for comprehension (attention, short-term memory, and mental control) was tested via standard neuropsychological tasks. Sixty-six women aged 30–79 were tested. Both errors and reaction times increased with age, especially for more complex syntactic types and implausible sentences. The neuropsychological factors tested contributed minimally to an age-related decline in comprehension, suggesting that the subtle breakdown seen in syntactic processing may be a language-specific impairment.

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority learners reading in English. Multivariate path analysis was used to investigate the unique contribution of derivational morphological awareness to reading comprehension as well as its indirect contributions via three hypothesized mediators for students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade (N = 101). Results indicated a significant unique contribution of morphological awareness, controlling for phonemic decoding, listening comprehension, reading vocabulary, word reading fluency, and passage reading fluency. Results further indicated significant indirect contributions of morphological awareness via reading vocabulary and passage fluency, but not via word reading fluency. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in second-language reading comprehension.

Results of recent studies comparing the spelling errors of children with varying discrepancies between their reading and spelling skills have yielded conflicting results. Some studies suggest that good readers-poor spellers (mixed) are characterized by a set of deficits that differentiates them from poor readers-poor spellers (poor). Other studies fail to find differences between groups of poor spellers who differ in their reading skills. The present study attempted to determine the degree to which these discrepant results reflected differences in methods of subject selection and of error analysis. Two different sets of criteria were used to identify poor spellers-good readers. Subjects were selected on the basis of standardized reading comprehension and spelling test scores or on the basis of standardized single-word-recognition and spelling-test scores. The phonetic accuracy of the spelling errors was assessed using two different scoring systems – one that took positional constraints into account and one that did not. In addition, children were identified at two different age levels, allowing for developmental comparisons. Regardless of age or reading ability, poor and mixed spellers had difficulty converting sounds into positionally appropriate graphemes. Only older children with good word recognition but poor spelling skills provided some evidence for a distinct subgroup of poor spellers. These children had relatively good visual memory for words and, unlike other poor spellers, showed relatively good use of rudimentary sound-letter correspondences.

Prosody production atypicalities are a feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but behavioral measures of performance have failed to provide detail on the properties of these deficits. We used acoustic measures of prosody to compare children with ASDs to age-matched groups with learning disabilities and typically developing peers. Overall, the group with ASD had longer utterance durations on multiple subtests on a test of prosodic abilities, and both the ASD and learning disabilities groups had higher pitch ranges and pitch variance than the typically developing group on one subtest. Acoustic differences were present even when the prosody was used correctly. These findings represent differences in the fine details of the acoustic output beyond its functional interpretation in both clinical groups.

Phonological awareness skills are prerequisite to early reading, yet the development of phonological awareness is an understudied phenomenon. To identify factors that contribute to the development of phonological awareness, we investigated the longitudinal relationships among child background factors, structural oral language, and phonological awareness in a sample of 52 children from kindergarten to second grade and a subsample of this group who were nonreaders in kindergarten. Background measures were IQ, family literacy, socioeconomic status, and child's primary language; oral language measures were receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology; phonological awareness was measured by segmentation and blending. Principal component analysis of the structural language measures yielded a general oral language factor score. Regression analyses indicated that the background variables were unique predictors of kindergarten general oral language skill but did not predict phonological awareness skills. General oral language accounted for significant and substantial unique variance in phonological awareness each year for both the full sample and the subsample of nonreaders, controlling for reading ability. These findings suggest general oral language may contribute to the development of early reading through its significant influence on the development of phonological awareness.

A set of procedures called referential mapping has been used to assign meaning to spontaneous vocalizations of an African Grey parrot. These spontaneous vocalizations were combinations and phonological variations of specific vocal English labels that the bird had previously acquired in a study on interspecies communication. These recombinations were not necessarily intentionally used to describe or request novel objects or circumstances, even though our earlier data demonstrated that the bird could use vocalizations referentially and intentionally to identify, request, refuse, and categorize various objects. The procedures for dealing with this bird's spontaneous modifications neither attempted to nor needed to evaluate the intentionality of his behavior. Rather, the procedures instructed his trainers to respond to the novel speech acts as though he were intentionally commenting about or requesting objects, actions, or information. The success of such procedures in attaching functional significance to his spontaneous vocalizations and in encouraging subsequent innovation suggests that the technique might be applicable to intervention programs for humans with specific communicative deficits.

The present study investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics from the perspective of functional constraints on sentence processing. The functionalist model of Bates and Mac-Whinney (1981a, 1987) is taken as a basis for investigating subjects' reactions to sentences in which word order, topic, and animacy are varied. Subjects were native speakers of Italian, a language which is sensitive to semantics for interpretation and English, a language which is sensitive to syntax for interpretation (Bates, McNew, MacWhinney, Devescovi, & Smith, 1982). The two native speaker groups were further subdivided in terms of second versus foreign language learners. This study focusses on the question of how learners move from one organizational system to another. It is argued that the ways in which L2 learners are able to determine the strength of dominant factors provides insights not only into the processes involved in L2 acquisition but also into the relative strength of components crosslinguistically and the strength of boundaries between linguistic and extra-linguistic information. The results suggest that in moving from a semantic-dominant language to a syntactic-dominant one, learners first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that language. On the other hand, moving in the other direction (from syntactic to semantic dominance) seems to come about with greater ease. To account for these results, a prototype model of acquisition is introduced. Finally, differences between second language and foreign language-learning environments are discussed.

Deficits in lexical access in children with specific language impairments (SLI) have been inferred from word naming, recall, and categorization tasks, but no evidence exists concerning these children's ability to identify words in spoken input. We presented successive auditory time gatings of unfamiliar words; familiar, phonologically related words; and familiar, phonologically unrelated words to school-age children with and without SLI. The groups did not differ significantly in the point at which they recognized familiar words, but the subjects with SLI required significantly more of the acoustic-phonetic signal than did their peers to recognize unfamiliar words. For all word types, the subjects with SLI were significantly less likely to respond with correct initial consonants at the earliest gated interval than were their peers. Our results suggest that both representational and perceptual inefficiencies may contribute to slowed lexical access in children with SLI.

This study compared the oral narrative skills of 31 school-aged children diagnosed at 24 to 31 months with expressive language delay (late talkers) with those of 23 typically developing peers. Based upon an extensively studied picture-book task, Frog, Where are You?, narratives were elicited from all participants both at age 8 and age 9. At age 9, children were asked to tell the story again and to increase their references to evaluative information (characters' emotions, character speech, and causal explanations of events; “supported” telling condition). Groups were compared on Syntax, Story Grammar, Cohesion, and Evaluative Information factor scores derived from the narrative measures. Children with histories of early language delay obtained lower Syntax, Story Grammar, and Evaluative Information factor scores than typically developing peers for each of their three narrative productions. The late talkers scored in the average range at age 8 on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Revised (CELF-R), but their scores were significantly lower than those of the comparison peers. When the group differences on the Story Grammar factor were reanalyzed with the CELF-R score as a covariate, the late talkers demonstrated weaknesses in story grammar skills independent of the variance accounted for by their weaker general language skills. This suggests that the use of narrative structure may be a specific area of underachievement for late talkers, in addition to their continuing weakness in syntactic and lexical abilities, relative to typically developing peers from the same SES background.

This study examines macrostructural aspects of narrative skills in 52 bilingual Swedish- and English-speaking children age 5–7. Elicited fictional story production and comprehension tasks were administered in parallel fashion in both Swedish and English (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives; Gagarina et al., 2012). Scores on the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives were compared across languages; moreover, story structure components in the narratives and answers to probe questions were qualitatively analyzed. Age effects (5-year-olds vs. 6- to 7-year-olds) for macrostructure production and narrative comprehension were evident, but no effect for language (Swedish/English). The results suggest that story structure is invariant across a bilingual child's two languages at a given age, with similar awareness of the intentions and goal-directed behavior of the story protagonists, irrespective of language.

The adequacy of 11 metrics for measuring linguistic complexity was evaluated by applying each metric to language samples obtained from 30 different adult speakers, aged 60–90 years. The analysis then determined how well each metric indexed age-group differences in complexity. In addition, individual differences in the complexity of adults' language were examined as a function of these complexity metrics using structural equation modeling techniques. In a follow-up study, judges listened to sentences in noise, rated their comprehensibility, and attempted to recall each sentence verbatim. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to evaluate the structural equation model, derived from the language samples, with respect to sentence comprehensibility and recall. While most of the metrics provided an adequate account of age-group and individual differences in complexity, the amount of embedding and the type of embedding proved to predict how easily sentences are understood and how accurately they are recalled.

Do older English as a second language (ESL) children have the same knowledge of word meanings as English as a first language (EL1) children? How important is vocabulary's role in predicting word recognition in these groups? This study sought to answer these questions by examining the profiles of ESL and EL1 upper elementary aged children, for a 2-year period starting in Grade 5. Multivariate analyses revealed that (a) EL1 and ESL groups did not differ on underlying processing components (e.g., phonological awareness [PA], rapid automatized naming [RAN], and working memory [WM]) or on word recognition, but ESL children continued to lag behind their EL1 peers on knowledge of word meanings that correspond approximately to their grade level; and (b) vocabulary knowledge (root words and receptive vocabulary), explained a small proportion of additional variance on word recognition concurrently and longitudinally after accounting for the contributions of PA, RAN, and WM.

This study reports an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of published functional neuroimaging studies of bilingualism. Four parallel meta-analyses were conducted by taking into account the proficiency of participants reported in the studies. The results of the meta-analyses suggest differences in the probabilities of activation patterns between high proficiency and moderate/low proficiency bilinguals. The Talairach coordinates of activation in first language processing were very similar to that of second language processing in the high proficient bilinguals. However, in the low proficient group, the activation clusters were generally smaller and distributed over wider areas in both the hemispheres than the clusters identified in the ALE maps from the high proficient group. These findings draw attention to the importance of language proficiency in bilingual neural representation.

Although pragmatic deficits are well documented in autism, little is known about the extent to which grammatical knowledge in this disorder is deficient, or merely delayed when compared to that of typically developing children functioning at similar linguistic or cognitive levels. This study examines the knowledge of constraints on the interpretation of personal and reflexive pronouns, an aspect of grammar not previously investigated in autism, and known to be subject to differential developmental schedules in unimpaired development. Fourteen children with autism (chronological age = 6–17 years, M = 11) showed some difficulties comprehending personal pronouns, no different from those observed in two groups of younger controls matched on nonverbal IQ or receptive grammar, but in line with the reported pragmatic deficits and general language delay in this population. However, their interpretation of reflexives was significantly worse than that of the control children. This pattern is not evidenced at any stage of typical development, revealing an impaired grammatical knowledge in our sample of children with autism, and is argued not to be due to a general language delay or cognitive deficits.