Children's heuristics for word learning have been the focus of much research, but little is known about bilinguals' and monolinguals' comparative use of them. In this study, 36 Serbian/ English bilinguals and 42 English monolinguals, who were between 5 and 8 years old and lived in the same neighborhoods in the United States, received a successive name training assessment of two heuristics: criterial use of highlighted features and preservation of mutual exclusivity. Older children employed both heuristics more often than younger ones. Monolinguals were more likely than bilinguals to interpret a highlighted feature as a necessary condition for applying a new English object name, but the groups did not differ in their tendency to maintain mutual exclusivity between the extensions of two novel English labels.

This study compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. Both groups performed on-line gender assignment to real nouns whose gender was regular or exceptional, given their ending, and to invented nouns with nonword stems and real-word endings. The pattern of results indicated that the native speakers' gender attributions were primarily based on rapidly evoked lexical associations, with gender-ending correspondences playing a significant but subsidiary role. The foreign learners were less able to summon lexical associations, relying heavily on ending-based rules. Overall, none of the foreign learners attained the same level of performance as any of the native speakers. We conclude that instruction in which students learn nouns in the context of distinctive lexical associates could profitably be supplemented by explicit instruction in gender-ending regularities.

Accurate phenotypic description is critical for the success of studies of the genetic basis for developmental language disorders. An important purpose of such a phenotypic description is to differentiate the language and associated cognitive profiles of syndromes or other developmental language disorders with diverse genotypes. In this paper we consider six measurement issues relevant to genotype/phenotype research and profiling: (a) Who is the target population? (b) What is the “ideal” measure of a single component of language? (c) What is the “ideal” measure(s) for quantifying the language (or language and cognitive) profile for a particular syndrome or disorder? (d) What are the special measurement issues for infants and young children? (e) How do we develop a profile? (f) What are the unresolved issues?

This study investigated the role of length and complexity on sentence repetition in children with dyslexia and typical readers. Length and complexity each had independent effects on sentence repetition, and children with dyslexia performed more poorly than typical readers. This group effect was attributable to individual differences in language rather than memory skills. Error analyses revealed that content words (specifically adjectives) were more likely to be omitted in longer than in shorter sentences independent of complexity. In complex sentences, function words (specifically prepositions) were the most vulnerable to errors, particularly for a subgroup of children with dyslexia who had oral language difficulties. It is proposed that deficits in sentence repetition are indicative of language difficulties in children with dyslexia.

A total of 35 children – 20 with expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E) and 15 typically developing (TD) peers – were compared longitudinally from 24 to 36 months with respect to their production of syllable shapes in 10-minute spontaneous speech samples. SLI-E 24-month-olds predominantly produced earlier developing syllable shapes containing vowels, liquids, and glides. TD 24-month-olds and SLI-E 36-month-olds produced approximately the same proportion of syllable types, with the exception of consonant clusters, where TD 24-month-olds produced more than SLI-E 36-month-olds. TD children at 36 months showed the greatest use of syllable shapes containing two different consonants and consonant clusters. Detailed analyses revealed that SLI-E children produced fewer syllable shapes containing final consonants, more than one consonant type, and consonant clusters. Furthermore, the children with SLI-E were found to vocalize less often than their TD peers. The possible relationships between these findings, SLI-E children's concomitant deficits in morphology and syntax, and the implications for diagnosis and remediation are discussed.

Previous models of agraphia have been descriptive and have emphasized the association of agraphia with other disorders such as aphasia and alexia. Such models have frequently led to inconsistent descriptions of specific agraphia types. These inconsistencies have made clinical-anatomical correlations difficult. Recent studies of agraphic patients with focal cerebral lesions have made it possible to develop a new model of writing based on specific neuropsychological mechanisms. In addition, results from computerized tomography have helped delineate probable anatomic substrates for many of these mechanisms. It is hoped this model provides a means for a better understanding of the mechanisms and anatomy underlying the agraphias as well as a better understanding of the relationships of the agraphias with aphasia and alexia.

In Experiment 1, 42 multilinguals were able to maintain native language writing quality and fluency in the presence of unattended irrelevant speech while maintaining a concurrent 6-digit memory load. In Experiment 2, 80 bilinguals reduced fluency during writing with the 6-digit load only. In previous research, over 100 monolinguals of comparable verbal and nonverbal skills in three experiments reduced quality and fluency under both secondary tasks (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 1996). The results are interpreted in terms of a bilingual skill advantage in suppressing irrelevant information. Possessing fluency in another language may confer long-term working memory benefits during dual-task language conditions for bilinguals and even more so for multilinguals.

The purpose of this study was to investigate word reading abilities in first and third grade Spanish-speaking children who were learning to read in Spanish; the performance of skilled and less skilled readers was compared across measures that assessed phonological recoding ability, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and phonemic awareness. The findings suggest that Spanish-speaking children relied on phonological recoding strategies in the process of becoming readers. First grade, less skilled readers seemed to depend on partial letter-sound knowledge. Furthermore, spelling-sound correspondences appeared to be the main source of information used by first grade, skilled readers and third grade, less skilled readers. The latter seemed to lag behind skilled readers in the use of word-specific information. The phonemic awareness tasks displayed moderate to low correlations with reading ability in the less skilled groups. It is argued that the simple phonological structure of Spanish and its shallow orthography lead to the phonological processing of letter strings during reading acquisition.

The production of passive sentences by children with specific language impairment (SLI) was studied in two languages, English and Cantonese. In both languages, the word order required for passive sentences differs from the word order used for active sentences. However, English and Cantonese passive sentences are quite different in other respects. We found that English-speaking children with SLI were less proficient than both same-age and younger typically developing peers in the use of passives, although difficulty could not be attributed to word order or a reliance on active sentences. Cantonese-speaking children with SLI proved less capable than same-age peers in their use of passive sentences but at least as proficient as younger peers. The implications of these cross-linguistic differences are discussed.

The real-time lexical processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined, and the focus was to determine whether a temporal processing deficit or a general processing capacity deficit disrupts these children's lexical processing. A group of SLI children (mean age 8;3), a group of age-matched children (CA, mean age 8;1), and a group of receptive syntax-matched children (RS; mean age 6;7) completed a sentence processing task in which they monitored sentences for a target word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of sentences. Sentences systematically varied with respect to containing either a high proportion of stop consonants (stop-loaded sentences) or a high proportion of nonstop consonants (nonstop-loaded sentences). Children also completed the Identification (ID) Speech Perception Task. On the sentence processing task, SLI children yielded significantly slower word recognition reaction time (RT) overall than both CA and RS controls. Sentence type had no effect on any subject group's RT. No Group × Sentence Type interaction was found. On the ID task, SLI children performed significantly worse than CA controls but similarly to RS children. No correlation was found between temporal processing and lexical processing (for either sentence type or sentences combined) for any group. The findings are interpreted to suggest that a general processing capacity limitation was responsible for the poor ID task performance and slower lexical processing of SLI children.

We investigate the production of relative clauses in Italian children aged 3 years, 4 months to 8 years, 10 months and in adults, focusing on object relatives (ORs). For both adults and older children, we test the production of passive ORs (PORs) as an alternative to the production of active ORs. We also test the comprehension of active ORs and PORs in older children, showing that the comprehension of the latter is significantly more accurate than the former. The persistent difficulty that children experience with ORs is interpreted as due to intervention, following Friedmann, Belletti, and Rizzi (2009). We assume Collins’ (2005) approach to passive and account for the increasing use and more accurate comprehension of PORs as a consequence of lack of intervention, as in Belletti (2009a).

Recent research has indicated that learners exposed to second language words’ orthographic forms of words can often use this information to make inferences about the words’ phonological forms. Here we asked, do learners benefit even when the orthography is unfamiliar? We taught native English speakers minimal nonword pairs differentiated by the Arabic velar–uvular contrast (e.g., [kubu], [qubu]) and manipulated the quality of orthographic input. We found that participants were consistently unable to associate the novel phonemes with novel words. Results are discussed in terms of (a) the role of orthographic input in second language word form learning, (b) the influence of orthographic familiarity in moderating the role of orthographic input, and (c) the issue of talker variability in word learning.

We have compared the verbal comprehension abilities of 34 right hemisphere damaged patients to 16 hospitalized control subjects of comparable age and educational attainment. The right hemisphere damaged patients performed as well as the control subjects on a vocabulary test, but were impaired in their ability to interpret proverbs and comprehend logico-grammatical sentences. Impairment on the proverbs test was the result of a decrease in the number of abstract interpretations, whereas impairment on the logico-grammatical sentence comprehension test was related to difficultes in grasping spatial and passive relationships. These comprehension impairments tended to correlate with visuospatial deficits and hemianopia, but not with the degree of hemiparesis or the presence of sensory extinction. Patients with anterior right hemisphere damage performed better on the logico-grammatical sentence conprehension test than patients with posterior damage. A variety of factors probably contribute to these verbal deficits including impaired intellect, inattention, an inability to grasp spatial relationships, and difficulties in manipulating the inner schemata of language.

This study examines the perception and processing of the Catalan /e/–/ɛ/ and /o/–/ɔ/ vowel contrasts by 60 Spanish–Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Results from binary forced-choice identification, AX discrimination, and lexical decision tasks show that even though these early and highly proficient bilinguals demonstrate a high accuracy in perceptual identification and discrimination tasks, they have difficulties distinguishing between words and nonwords in a lexical decision task. Spanish dominants also exhibited higher error rates than Catalan dominants in the lexical decision task. These findings provide evidence that making explicit judgments regarding whether a certain sound belongs to a phonemic category (i.e., as accomplished via identification and discrimination tasks) does not entail that listeners have an appropriate representation at the lexical level.

A large-scale study of complex wh-questions with 1,000 subjects aged 4–9 years is reported. The subjects' dialects were Mainstream American English or African American English, and approximately one-third were language impaired. The study examined when children permit long distance wh-movement, and when they respect a variety of syntactic barriers to movement. Thirteen different structures were compared, and the results suggest that typically developing children and disordered children at all the ages studied are capable of long-distance movement and obedience to abstract barriers. In no case was dialect a significant factor in the children's linguistic performance on these tasks.

This study addressed visual word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are proficient in German Sign Language (DGS) and German. The study specifically investigated whether DGS signs are activated during a monolingual German word recognition task despite the lack of similarity in German orthographic representations and DGS phonological representations. Deaf DGS–German bilinguals saw pairs of German words and decided whether the words were semantically related. Half of the experimental items had phonologically related translation equivalents in DGS. Participants were slower to reject semantically unrelated word pairs when the translation equivalents were phonologically related in DGS than when the DGS translations were phonologically unrelated. However, this was not the case in Turkish–German hearing bilinguals who do not have sign language knowledge. The results indicate that lexical representations are associated cross-linguistically in the bilingual lexicon irrespective of their orthographic or phonological form. Implications of these results for reading development in deaf German bilinguals are discussed.

This study investigated the recognition of Swedish inflected nouns in two participant groups. Both groups were Finnish-speaking late learners of Swedish, but the groups differed in regard to their Swedish language proficiency. In a visual lexical decision task, inflected Swedish nouns from three frequency ranges were contrasted with corresponding monomorphemic nouns. The reaction times and error rates suggested morphological decomposition for low-frequency inflected words. Yet, both medium- and high-frequency inflected words appeared to possess full-form representations. Despite an overall advantage for the more proficient participants, this pattern was present in both groups. The results indicate that even late exposure to a language can yield such input representations for morphologically complex words that are typical of native speakers.

In an experiment based on the competition model, 12 native Japanese speakers (J1 group) and 12 native English speakers studying Japanese (JFL group) were requested to report sentence subjects after listening to Japanese word strings which consisted of one verb and two nouns each. Similarly, 12 native English speakers (E1 group) and 12 native Japanese speakers studying English (EFL group) reported the sentence subjects of English word strings. In each word string, syntactic (word order) cues and lexical-semantic (animacy/inanimacy) cues converged or diverged as to the assignment of the sentence subjects. The results show that JFL-Ss (experimental subjects) closely approximated the response patterns of J1-Ss, while EFL-Ss showed evidence of transfer from their first language, Japanese. The results are consistent with the developmental precedence of a meaning-based comprehension strategy over a grammar-based one.

Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number, but are these different phi-features processed distinctly or similarly? We used a sentence grammaticality task to explore the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject–verb person and number phi-feature agreement violations. We generated grammatical structures (grammatical control) and ungrammatical structures in which the verb disagreed with the subject in person (person violation), in number (number violation), or in both person and number features (person+number violation). Behavioral data revealed that, overall, participants were faster and more accurate detecting person and person+number violations than violations involving only number. Event-related potential responses revealed a N400–P600 pattern for all violation types. Person and person+number violations elicited larger P600 effects than number violations. These findings reveal different costs related to the processing of person and number phi-feature agreement and indicate that these features are distinct components of agreement computation.

An African Grey parrot, Alex, who had learned to use English speech in studies on referential interspecies communication and animal cognition, produced English monologues in both the presence and absence of human receivers. This study examines one component of Alex’s monologue behavior, private speech, while he was being taught new vocalizations. His private speech during those time periods included a small percentage of novel utterances, not yet used in the presence of his caretakers, that were phonologically related to, but not exact reproductions of, the new vocalizations. His monologues also contained utterances that were part of the general daily routine as well as the specific training paradigm, but rarely included verbatim reproductions of the training scenario. Alex’s behaviors were comparable to those of children in the early stages of language acquisition. Because monologue behavior has been characterized as a form of practice that facilitates human language development, the data are discussed in terms of the possible functions of monologues during Alex’s acquisition of novel vocalizations.