Several studies have reported that the articulatory abilities of Down's syndrome children are poor, but have provided little detail on the nature of the articulation problem. This paper presents a phonological analysis of the spontaneous speech of four Down's syndrome children, ages 3;10–6;3 including a) the phonetic inventory of each subject, b) a comparison of target consonant phonemes and the subjects' renditions of these phonemes, and c) a characterization of the subjects' errors in terms of phonological processes. The findings indicate that 1) although the subjects are capable of producing nearly all the consonant phonemes, correct production is often limited to a particular position within the word, 2) the phonological processes which account for the errors of the Down's syndrome subjects are similar to those reported for young normal children, and 3) the phonological abilities of the four subjects are comparable to, or better than, their general language ability as measured by MLU.

The purpose of the study was to investigate individual differences in French language achievement in a group of grade 1 anglophone students attending a total early immersion program. A number of different predictor factors were used to predict achievement in French language arts, listening comprehension and oral production; achievement in English reading was also assessed. The predictor factors included indices of the students' attitudes, personality traits, non-verbal reasoning ability, degree of field independence and school-related behavior. Multiple regression techniques were used to analyze the associations between the predictor factors and the results of the achievement tests.

Teachers' ratings of the students' behavior along with the cognitive factors of field independence and non-verbal reasoning ability were found to be positively correlated with achievement in French language arts and listening comprehension. The cognitive factors were also found to correlate positively with achievement levels in English reading. No significant predictors emerged in the case of oral production. The findings are discussed further in terms of their pedagogical implications.

The purposes of this study were to examine the dimensions underlying morphological awareness (MA) in Arabic (construct validity) and to determine how well MA predicted reading (predictive validity). Ten MA tasks varying in key dimensions (oral vs. written, single word vs. sentence contexts, and standard vs. local dialect) and two reading tasks (real word and pseudoword reading) were administered to 102 Arabic-speaking Grade 3 children in Abu-Dhabi. Factor analysis of the MA tasks yielded one predominant factor, supporting the construct validity of MA in Arabic. Closer inspection revealed that this factor had two subcomponents, oral and written. Hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for age and gender, indicated that both the one- and the two-factor solutions accounted for 48% of the variance in word reading, and 40% of the variance in pseudoword reading, supporting the predictive validity of MA. Implications for future research, assessment, and instruction are discussed.

The purpose of this article is to outline the types and frequency of explanatory talk that occur in naturalistic conversations of low-income families of preschoolers. Thirty-one families participated in the study, tape-recording family mealtimes when their children were 3, 4, and 5 years old. A total of 75 transcripts were collected and analyzed for the presence of nine categories of explanatory talk, including intentional, causal, evidential, definitional/descriptive, procedural, and consequential. Explanatory talk consisted of conversation concerning some connection between objects, events, concepts, and/or conclusions that one speaker is pointing out to another. The most frequent type of explanations fell into intentional categories, which accounted for more than half of all segments of explanatory talk.

Research from several sources indicates that reading disability is often associated with difficulty in comprehending some complex spoken sentences, including those with relative clauses. The present study exploits a new methodology, elicited production, to identify the source of comprehension difficulties of poor readers. Both the elicited production task and a conventional act-out task were employed in a study of 30 children (aged 7-8), who were selected for reading ability. On the act-out task, the poor readers displayed a high error rate on two relative clause structures (SO and OO relatives), as had been found by Mann, Shankweiler, and Smith (1984), but these structures were elicited from the poor readers as successfully as from the good readers (on more than 80% of trials).

This tutorial for the statistical processing of reaction times collected through a repeated-measure design is addressed to researchers in psychology. It aims at making explicit some important methodological issues, at orienting researchers to the existing solutions, and at providing them some evaluation tools for choosing the most robust and precise way to analyze their data. The methodological issues we tackle concern data filtering, missing values management, and statistical modeling (F1, F2, F1 + F2, quasi-F, mixed-effects models with hierarchical, or with crossed factors). For each issue, references and remedy suggestions are given. In addition, modeling techniques are compared on real data and a benchmark is given for estimating the precision and robustness of each technique.

This article reports a single case study of a brain-damaged subject who presented with impaired performance on tasks involving production of verbal numbers (i.e., numbers in the form of words, such as eighty-six). Lexical errors occurred in spoken production but not in written production. Syntactic errors, however, occurred in both production modes. This pattern of performance provides empirical support for assumptions about the componential structure of the normal number processing system.

The study sought evidence consistent with the hypothesis that phonological recoding of printed words is important during reading acquisition. Children at the end of their Kindergarten year were given a test of nonsense word reading (as a measure of phonological recoding skill) as well as tests of sight word reading and verbal intelligence. Two groups of 28 children were matched on sex, school attended, sight word reading, and verbal intelligence, but differed on phonological recoding skill. If phonological recoding was important in reading acquisition, the children with greater skill in this area should make greater gains in reading achievement over the following years. When reading achievement was tested at the end of Grades 1 and 2, these children were found to be significantly ahead.

In three typical phonological awareness tasks it was found that children with normal reading development sometimes give responses that are based on orthographic rather than phonological information. In dyslexic children, the number of occurrences of such orthographic intrusions was significantly lower. This effect cannot be explained by positing a lower degree of orthographic knowledge in dyslexic children since a group of younger children who had the same spelling level as the dyslexics also showed more orthographic intrusions. A plausible explanation for this difference between normal and dyslexic readers is that, in normal readers, phonological and orthographic representations of words are so closely connected that they are usually coactivated, even if such a coactivation is misleading. In dyslexics this connection is less strong, so that orthographic representations interfere less with phonemic segmentation. The relevance of this finding with respect to recent assumptions about the importance of phonology in establishing orthographic representations is discussed.

We examined whether Grade 4, 6, and 8 children access the base form when reading morphologically complex words. We asked children to read words varying systematically in the frequency of the surface and base forms and in the transparency of the base form. At all grade levels, children were faster at reading derived words with high rather than low base frequencies when the words were of low surface frequency. Effects of the frequency and transparency of the base form on word reading accuracy occurred only in Grades 4 and 6. The results add to the growing body of evidence that children access the morphological structure of the words that they encounter in print.

Research in monolingual populations indicate that vocabulary knowledge is essential to reading achievement, but how vocabulary develops in bilingual children has been understudied. The current study investigated the role of home and school factors in predicting English vocabulary among 284 bilingual kindergartners (168 Chinese, 65 Malay, 51 Indian) in the multilingual context of Singapore. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Third Edition was administered in English and in translations into Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. Home factors including caretaker language, television language, and mother tongue vocabulary were found to be significant predictors of English vocabulary, controlling for mother's years of education and family income. The curriculum emphasis of the kindergarten center was also found to be a significant predictor of English vocabulary.

This article examines the reliability and validity of the construct, mode of acquisition (MOA). The MOA of a word denotes the way in which the word's meaning is learned. A word's meaning can be acquired perceptually, linguistically, or by some combination of both. In Experiment 1, 26 student volunteers from third year special education courses rated 566 words, taken from reading texts in elementary school, on MOA. Our findings show that MOA ratings gradually change over grades, shifting from mainly perceptually acquired word meanings in Grade 1 texts to mainly linguistically acquired concepts in Grade 6 texts. In Experiment 2, 34 educational professionals completed a list on MOA, concreteness, or imageability. Judgments on the MOA proved to be different from judgments of concreteness and imageability. We suggest that the increasingly linguistic character of word meanings contribute to explaining some of the reading difficulties of deaf children.

This study examined transfer facilitation effect of first language morphological awareness on second language lexical inference ability among Grade 6 Chinese-speaking English as a foreign language learners in China. A set of paper and pencil tests was administered to measure children's morphological awareness and lexical inference ability in both Chinese and English. Results showed that the contribution of Chinese morphological awareness to English morphological awareness was larger for compound words than for derived words. In addition, the indirect effect of Chinese compound awareness on English compound word meaning inference was significant, but that of Chinese derivational awareness on English derived word meaning inference did not achieve significance. These findings confirmed that cross-linguistic transfer of Chinese morphological awareness was responsive to the linguistic distance between Chinese and English.

We introduce an objective method for classifying phonological overlap between Spanish and English translation equivalents. This method then is exploited to examine spoken word recognition using stimuli with graded levels of phonological overlap. Performance by typical English-only speaking (EO) children and English-only children with primary language impairment (LI) is compared to a control group of bilingual Spanish–English peers (BI). Response time and accuracy separated groups, with the BI group outperforming the EO group, who in turn outperformed the LI group. Children with more severe LI are slower than those with mild LI, and LI severity is significantly correlated with speed. The two groups of monolingual children and the LI subgroups respond in a qualitatively similar way to decreasing phonological overlap.

The present investigation sought to evaluate patterns of article use in a group of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). In particular, because of conflicting results reported in previous studies, it was of interest to discern specific types of nontarget responses and how these corresponded to what has been reported in other Spanish-speaking children with SLI. Eleven children with SLI and 11 age-matched peers participated in the study. Three different spontaneous speech samples were gathered from each child. In addition, an experimental task that assessed the children's use of articles with a variety of nouns was also administered to the children. The results of the study for both spontaneous speech and experimental data indicated that the children with SLI performed significantly poorer in their use of Spanish articles than their age-matched peers. Most of the nontarget responses consisted of omission of the target article. In contrast to a previous study by Restrepo and Gutiérrez–Clellen, the children did not present with deficits in noun phrase gender agreement. The gender errors that were observed appeared to be due to difficulties accessing the correct article form and not due to deficits in knowledge of the gender agreement paradigm. Possible theoretical explanations were explored suggesting that both processing and linguistic explanations, in particular optionality of determiners, could explain the observed patterns. Reasons for cross-study differences in error patterns are suggested, including relative phonological skill and language learning environment.

Children between 3–5 years who knew the alphabet but could not read were given three tasks. In the first, they decided which of two words was longer when the word pairs were presented orally, in writing, or accompanying pictures. In the second, they “read” a word when it accompanied a picture of the named object and then again when it was placed with a picture of a different object. Finally, they were given a set of plastic letters with which they could create their own words. Although all the children had explicit knowledge of letters and sounds, they lacked symbolic knowledge of how letters represent sounds. This symbolic knowledge, it is claimed, is a precondition to learning to read.

Previous studies have shown inconsistent results concerning bilinguals' use of gestures to compensate for reduced proficiency in their second language (L2). These results could be because of differing task demands. In this study, we asked 16 intermediate English L2 speakers (whose first language [L1] was Chinese) to watch a story and tell it back in both languages. We attempted to link gesture use to proficiency while accounting for task complexity as measured by scenes recalled. The results showed that these L2 speakers told longer stories in their L1 and used more iconic gestures in their L2. There were also trends for the women to tell longer stories and use more gestures in their L2 compared to the men. These results are consistent with the idea that the relationship between gesture use and proficiency is mediated by task complexity. The trends for gender differences, however, point to the possibility that gesture use is also related to expressivity.

This study investigated the possible influence of first language (L1) collocational patterns on second language (L2) collocational processing. A lexical decision task was used to assess whether collocational patterns acceptable in the L1 but not the L2 would still be activated when processing language entirely in the L2. The results revealed no such activation. Furthermore, L2 speakers did not produce accelerated processing for control collocations that were acceptable in the L2 but not the L1. Based on these findings, we put forth some theoretical suggestions regarding recent research indicating accelerated processing for congruent over incongruent collocations. Finally, our NS control group revealed some unexpected tendencies that cannot be easily accounted for with our current understanding of L1 language processing.

A previous study reported that, similar to young and adult skilled readers, Italian developmental dyslexics read pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix faster and more accurately than simple pseudowords. Unlike skilled readers, only dyslexic and reading-matched younger children benefited from morphological structure in reading words aloud. In this study, we show that word frequency affects the probability of morpheme-based reading, interacting with reading ability. Young skilled readers named low- but not high-frequency morphologically complex words faster than simple words. By contrast, the advantage for morphologically complex words was present in poor readers irrespective of word frequency. Adult readers showed no facilitating effect of morphological structure. These results indicate that young readers use reading units (morphemes) that are larger than the single-grapheme grain size. It is argued that morpheme-based reading is important for obtaining reading fluency (rather than accuracy) in transparent orthographies and is useful particularly in children with limited reading ability who do not fully master whole-word processing.

This study examined the use of clitic pronouns by incipient bilingual Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-old children with and without language impairments. Incipient bilingualism refers to the initial stages of contact between two languages, when an individual still has only passive knowledge of a second language. The participants included 10 children with typical language development and 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI). The experimental task elicited clitic pronouns serving as direct objects with finite verbs (lo, la, los, and las). The children who had SLI used clitic pronouns less frequently than their age-matched peers and were less accurate in their use of gender agreement for clitics. No group differences were found for third person singular and plural verb inflections in the preterite tense. These results were compared to previous studies of Spanish- and Italian-speaking children with SLI.