This study examines the relationship between age of immersion (AOI) and the degree of perceived accent (DPA) that raters who speak native English perceive in the speech of Mandarin speakers who learned English as a second language. AOI and speech samples of variable length and linguistic context (single words, sentences, short paragraph, and self-generated picture narration) were collected from the target group (n=32, AOI=3–16) and from native speaker controls. A moderately trained native speaker panel of college students then rated the samples on how “native” they sounded using a continuous scale. Rating was broken over three separate sessions to relieve fatigue, and a reliability measure was administered at the onset and termination of each session to ensure consistency. Reliable performance was demonstrated both across judges and across sessions and indicated no single AOI demarcated a “critical period.” Instead, DPA was found to deviate from native in a highly linear manner with AOI, as did speakers' tendencies to noticeably deflect from this line. These deviations began at an AOI of about 5, although some speakers bottomed out with an AOI as early as 7, whereas nearly native ratings were given to others whose AOI was greater than 5. Females were rated as more native and variably accented than males. Ratings of native decreased with sampling length but increased with extemporization, the effect of AOI on DPA being similar for all sampling types.

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children's own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children's own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters.

Gestures are often used while speaking to aid in the speaker's packaging of the verbal message and/or to aid the listener in decoding the message. The ways in which bilinguals use gestures are reviewed in this article. Researchers have predicted that bilinguals' gesture use is related to bilinguals' language proficiency. However, no clear pattern of a link between proficiency and gesture use has been observed across studies, probably because gestures rarely compensate for weak language proficiency, functioning instead to facilitate speech production in both first and second language use. Researchers have reported bilinguals using language-specific gestures in the other language. In addition, bilinguals have been shown to use gestures at a higher rate than monolinguals. These results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer can apply to gestures, as well as to other linguistic units. In conclusion, gestures play an important role in accessing language in the process of speech production. This conclusion has implications for second-language teaching; teaching through gestures and speech might be more effective than teaching the spoken component alone.

This study examined whether books that are typically read to preschool children contain theory of mind concepts. The parents of 47 preschool children recorded books read by or to their child over a one-week period. The books were analyzed for theory of mind content. It was found that 78% of the books contained internal state language, 34% contained false beliefs, and 43% contained personality descriptors. Thus, theory of mind concepts appear to be an integral part of the literature read to preschool children. These results are discussed in light of recent work on individual differences in theory of mind development.

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition process.

This study examined the extent to which first language (L1) fluency behavior, cross-linguistic differences, and proficiency can predict second language (L2) fluency behavior over time. English L1 Spanish (n = 24) and French (n = 25) majors completed a picture-based oral narrative in the L2 before and after 5 months residing abroad and later in the L1 after returning home. Data were coded for seven measures of speed, breakdown, and repair fluency. The results from multiple regressions indicated that L1 fluency behavior, cross-linguistic differences, and proficiency differentially contributed to explaining L2 fluency behavior prior to and during immersion. These findings suggest that when investigating L1–L2 fluency relationships considerations of mitigating factors such as cross-linguistic differences are necessary, and it is worthwhile to focus on how the contributions of these factors shift during development.

For decades, developmental research has involved the study of sex differences in language acquisition. Many studies of these differences have found a slight advantage in competence for females early in life that seems to wane with age. However, because most of these studies have focused on sex differences in mean values, they have mostly neglected sex differences in variance with males being more variable. In the current study, we examined sex differences in language competence in terms of mean values and variance in large samples (N > 10,000) of German children aged 3–6 years. We administered several tests to assess the children's vocabulary, grammar, speech comprehension, pronunciation, and the processing of sentences and nonce words. Girls performed better than boys in all domains, most often to a statistically significant degree, although the effect sizes were small. Differences decreased with age. Boys varied significantly more than girls in their language competence. In response, we discuss explanations for these findings, as well as recommend directions for future research.

Reading acquisition was related to phonological sensitivity and rapid naming in a longitudinal study with young children. Phonological assessment consisted of rhyme and initial consonant discrimination, while the rapid naming tasks were made up of pictures, letters, and numbers. The subjects were 95 children from two grade levels, primary and first grade. They were tested in the fall and spring of the first year and the spring of the second year. It was found that the phonological and rapid naming tests each predicted unique variance in reading attainment, as measured at the end of the second year of the study. The rapid naming responses became more automatic early in the first grade year, while naming times generally became faster. Although many researchers regard rapid naming as part of the phonological core, the present article discusses the various advantages of considering rapid naming as a separate factor in reading development.

This study investigated fast mapping in late-talking (LT) toddlers and toddlers with normal language (NL) development matched on age, nonverbal cognition, and maternal education. The fast-mapping task included novel object labels and familiar words. The LT group scored significantly lower than the NL group on novel word comprehension and production, as well as familiar word production. For both groups, fast-mapping performance was associated with concurrent language ability and later language outcomes. A post hoc analysis of phonotactic probability (PP) and neighborhood density (ND) suggested that the majority of NL toddlers displayed optimal learning of the nonword with low PP/ND. The LT group did not display the same sensitivity to PP/ND characteristics as the NL group.

Children assessed as reading disabled are often thought to use decoding processes that differ from those of nondisabled children. This assumption was examined in a study that compared the word recognition skills of a group of clinic-diagnosed reading disabled children with those of good and poor readers. Subjects read words and nonwords containing either regular or homographic spelling patterns. Regular patterns have a single pronunciation (e.g., -UST) while homographic patterns have multiple pronunciations (e.g., -ONE). Analyses of the errors, latencies, and types of pronunciations indicated that while the performance of the poor and disabled readers differed from that of the good readers, the two below-average reader groups were very similar. The reading disabled children exhibited decoding processes similar to those exhibited by younger nondisabled readers. The results suggest that many children who meet the diagnostic criteria for reading disability may be indistinguishable from nondisabled children in terms of actual reading performance.

Nineteen language-impaired (LI) and 20 language-normal (LN) children participated in an on-line word-monitoring task. Words were presented in lists and in sentences readily comprehended by younger children. The sentences were unaltered, tow-pass filtered, and time- compressed. Both groups had shorter mean response times (MRTs), but lower accuracy, for words in sentences than words in lists. The LI children had significantly longer MRTs under sentence conditions and lower accuracy overall than the LN children. Filtering had an adverse effect upon accuracy and MRT for both subject groups. Time compression did not, suggesting that the reduction in high-frequency information and the rate of presentation exert different effects. Subject differences in attention, as well as in linguistic competence and motor control, may have influenced word-monitoring performance.

The method of sorting is used to compare sets of adjectival contexts. Contexts of directly antonymous adjectives are found to be highly discriminable, both with sentential and phrasal contexts. These results are used to argue that words with different meanings normally appear in discriminably different contexts, and that the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability, but rather their relatively frequent co-occurrence in the same sentence.

Two experiments examined factors affecting the initial phase of word learning. Four- to 11-year-olds heard new words in three presentation conditions: A conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Overall the results indicate that children at all ages could identify the new words as “words,” were sensitive to correct usage, and could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. Older children benefited more than younger ones from explicit definitions, suggesting that metalinguistic awareness and memory strategies affect word learning. Evidence also suggests that meanings for new words are better learned if the exemplar is peripheral to previously named categories than if the word is central to a previously named category.

A test of pseudoword repetition was developed and administered to a group of 24 learning-disabled children. Twenty nondisabled children were also assessed. The major objective was to investigate associations between learning-disabled children's ability to repeat pseudowords and their performances on other measures of phonological processing, as well as on measures of academic achievement. Results revealed that the repetition procedure had good psychometric characteristics, including the ability to distinguish disabled and nondisabled groups independent of IQ. Within the learning-disabled sample, repetition ability was more closely related to reading and spelling skills than to math achievement. Measures of phonological skill were moderately associated with one another. Findings suggest that the repetition task may be useful in identifying one important correlate of childhood learning disabilities. Results justify further research on the mechanisms responsible for repetition difficulties and on the significance of these difficulties for reading and spelling acquisition.

Expression of spatial motion shows wide variation as well as patterned regularities across the world's languages (Talmy, 2000), and events involving the traversal of a spatial boundary impose the tightest typological constraints in the lexicalization of motion, providing a true test of cross-linguistic differences. Speakers of verb-framed languages are required by their language not to use manner verbs in marking the change of location across boundaries (Aske, 1989). Here we test the strength of the boundary-crossing constraint and ask how speakers convey motion events when the constraints imposed by the experimental task are at odds with the constraints imposed by their native language. We address this question by comparing adult speakers’ description of motion scenes that involve the traversal of a spatial boundary in two typologically distinct languages: English and Turkish. Using an experimental paradigm that imposes competing demands with the semantic structure of Turkish, we compare Turkish speakers’ description of boundary-crossing scenes to that of English speakers. We find strong cross-linguistic differences in speakers’ verb choice (manner vs. path) and event segmentation (one vs. many), suggesting that boundary-crossing constraint can serve as a reliable test to detect the typological class of a language.

The abilities of second language speakers to discriminate the prosodic contrasts between idiomatic and literal meanings of ambiguous sentences were investigated using utterances previously shown to be reliably identified by acoustic cues. Four listener groups of varying proficiency, native speakers of American English, native speakers of non-American English, fluent nonnative speakers of English, and advanced students of English as a second language (ESL), judged whether single and paired, tape-recorded, literal and idiomatic utterances were spoken with intended idiomatic or literal meanings. Both native speaker groups performed significantly better than fluent nonnatives, while ESL students performed at chance. These results lend support to the hypothesis that abilities to discriminate subtle prosodic contrasts are learned later than other components of speech and language.

In order to assess the effect of total deafness on vocalization development, tape recorded utterances of a 3-year-old child who was born without cochleas were examined. In the beginning of the study, the subject's speech consisted almost exclusively of small numbers of sounds characteristic of early infancy. Across the study, the subject participated in extensive vocal stimulation activities. He also initially received intermittent exposure to tactile speech information via a 16-channel vocoder and, subsequently, a 2-channel tactile aid. Following introduction of the 2-channel aid, the subject made rapid improvement in the quality of his vocalizations, which consisted increasingly of speech-like utterances, including well-formed or canonical syllables. These results suggest that, although hearing impairment slows the onset of canonical babbling, even total deafness does not preclude its eventual appearance.

Memory for content, or gist recall, was studied in groups of normal and language-impaired children, matched on age and sex, using a story recall task. The children were pretested for their ability to comprehend individual sentences in the stories. Following a practice session, two test stories were read to each child and oral recall was requested immediately after each story. The content of the recall protocols was analyzed into propositions and scored for accuracy, organization, and temporal ordering. The results showed that the groups differed primarily in the amount of accurate recall, with the language-impaired group recalling considerably less than the normal group. It was concluded that language-impaired children do exhibit deficits in gist recall for material which is within their linguistic grasp.

Our goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant group differences between the groups in phoneme duration discrimination but not in perception of amplitude modulation and rise time. Correlations among rise time discrimination, phoneme duration, and spelling accuracy were found for children with RD. Those children with poor rise time discrimination were also poor in phoneme duration discrimination and in spelling. Results suggest that auditory processing abilities could, at least in some children, affect speech perception skills, which in turn would lead to phonological processing deficits and dyslexia.

This study provides new evidence concerning the pattern of acquisition of free and bound morphemes in Italian, based on the speech of 59 children recorded through a cross-sectional method. We found that inflectional morphology is mastered before free-standing morphology. Despite the great variety of verb inflections, the analyses showed that children partially master present indicative from early productions. Although free-standing morphemes are used correctly, they are optionally omitted. Here we have explored the use and omission of articles, clitics, the copula, and auxiliaries and have shown that omission is subject to certain constraints. Articles are mainly omitted from the root of the clause, much as null subjects, because from this position the requirement of clausal identification is voided. A higher omission of accusative clitics than dative clitics was observed that has also been explained in terms of the uniqueness checking constraint: accusative, but not dative clitics need to check the D feature twice, because the former, but not the latter, trigger past particle agreement. The uniqueness checking constraint has been adopted to explain the higher omission of auxiliaries with respect to the copula: the former, but not the latter, have to check the T feature twice. Together, these findings suggest that children omit, but in principled ways.