This study aimed to examine 88 intermediate learners of second language Spanish’ depth of processing under different types of instruction when being exposed to a complex grammar form, the imperfect subjunctive, on a reading task. Depth of processing was measured by employing think-aloud protocols. Due to the absence of reactivity, six silent and think-aloud conditions were merged into three experimental ones differing in explicitness. The study followed a pre-, post-, and delayed test design with 2 weeks between tests, which consisted of interpretation, controlled-production, and comprehension tests. Overall, results showed that participants in the more explicit condition produced more instances of processing, and that deeper processing correlated with a more accurate production of the target form and with a higher comprehension of the reading passage.

We analyzed the role played by theory of mind (ToM) in children's ability to recognize and repair different kinds of communicative failures. In particular, we analyzed three different kinds of communicative failures: failure of the expression act, communicative meaning, and communicative effect. We administered videotaped stories, in which people act out a communicative failure and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children ranging in age from 3.5 to 8.5 years. The children showed a trend of increasing difficulty in managing the communicative failures investigated. Moreover, children's ToM ability is partially correlated with recognition and repair of a communicative task; however, it is not able to explain the trend of difficulty we detected. We suggest that the factor better explaining such trend is the increasing complexity of the mental representations underlying the three different kinds of failures.

The present study investigated whether German speakers compute grammatical gender on the basis of gender-marking regularities. To this purpose two experiments were run. In Experiment 1, participants had to assign the definite article to German nouns in an online task; in the second experiment, participants were confronted with German nouns as well as nonwords in an untimed gender assignment task. In the online experiment, which required the repetition of a visually presented noun with its corresponding definite article as fast as possible, reaction times show that the assignment of the definite determiner to a noun is not facilitated by gender-marking regularities. In an offline gender assignment task, however, participants profited from gender cues during gender assignment to nonwords.

The close relationship between children's vocabulary size and their later academic success has led researchers to explore how vocabulary development might be promoted during the early school years. We describe a study that explored the effectiveness of naturalistic classroom storytelling as an instrument for teaching new vocabulary to 6- to 9-year-old children. We examined whether learning was facilitated by encountering new words in single versus multiple story contexts, or by the provision of age-appropriate definitions of words as they were encountered. Results showed that encountering words in stories on three occasions led to significant gains in word knowledge in children of all ages and abilities, and that learning was further enhanced across the board when teachers elaborated on the new words’ meanings by providing dictionary definitions. Our findings clarify how classroom storytelling activities can be a highly effective means of promoting vocabulary development.

To deal with variation in the speech signal, listeners rely on local context, such as speaking rate in a carrier sentence directly preceding a target, as well as more global properties of the speech signal, such as speaker-specific pronunciation variants. The present study addressed whether, despite its variability even within one speaker, habitual speaking rate can be tracked as a speaker-specific property and how such speaker-specific tracking of habitual rate would interact with effects of local-rate normalization. In two experiments, listeners were exposed to a 2-min dialogue between a fast and a slow speaker. At test, listeners categorized minimal word pair continua differing in the German /a/–/a:/ duration contrast spoken by the same two speakers. The results showed that listeners responded with /a:/ more often for the fast speaker but only when words were presented in isolation and not when presented with additional local-rate information. That is, despite the general assumption that duration cues and speaking rate are too variable to be used in a speaker-specific fashion, tracking habitual speaking rate may help speech perception. The results are discussed in relation to a belief-updating model of perceptual adaptation and exemplar models.

Experiments using the gating paradigm investigated the effects of auditory–visual (AV) and auditory-only perceptual training on second-language spoken-word identification by Japanese and Korean learners of English. Stimuli were familiar bisyllabic words beginning with /p/, /f/, //, /l/, and /s, t, k/ combined with high, low, and rounded vowels. Results support the priming role of visual cues in AV speech processing. Identification was earlier with visual cues and following training, especially for words beginning with // and /l/, which also showed significant effects of adjacent vowel. For the Japanese, the AV advantage in identifying //- and /l/-initial words was accentuated following training. Findings are discussed within a multimodal episodic model of learning.

The role of morphology in reading development was examined by measuring participants’ eye movements while they read sentences containing either a hyphenated (e.g., ulko-ovi “front door”) or concatenated (e.g., autopeli “racing game”) compound. The participants were Finnish second, fourth, and sixth graders (aged 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively). Fast second graders and all four and sixth graders read concatenated compounds faster than hyphenated compounds. This suggests that they resort to slower morpheme-based processing for hyphenated compounds but prefer to process concatenated compounds via whole-word representations. In contrast, slow second graders’ fixation durations were shorter for hyphenated than concatenated compounds. This implies that they process all compounds via constituent morphemes and that hyphenation comes to aid in this process.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllable is a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered to children in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate that the phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabic affixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependent on developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the language and its orthography.

This paper investigates the relationship between the ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 6–8 years who completed tasks involving reading words, reading pseudowords, stressing pseudowords, and reproducing pseudoword stress patterns. Results showed that the capacity to reproduce pseudoword stress patterns accounted for a unique portion of the variance in text reading, after controlling for phonological awareness, phoneme sensitivity, and working memory. In addition, stress sensitivity predicted children's performance in stressing pseudowords. These results suggest that stress sensitivity may affect fluency in reading as well as word stress learning.

Researchers who study the writing process have found that beginning writers do little spontaneous revising of their own texts. This study explores the possibility that beginning writers do not revise because they do not read their own writing. The assumption behind the study is that explicit self-questioning strategies would engage young writers in reading their texts; thus they would become more active revisers. The experimental intervention is a question-prompt computer program (added to a word processing program) that guides the 11 to 16-year-old subjects to examine their own writing by asking themselves questions about their texts. This process was intended to engage the subjects in reading the text closely and revising more extensively. Analyses of the number and nature of revisions indicate that self-reflective question-prompts engage students in reading their texts and lead to significant changes in revising strategy.

This article reports on an investigation of the development of literacy, bilingualism, and metalinguistic awareness. The particular context of the study (high levels of bilingualism among school-age children) and the particular language contact situation (an indigenous language) offer a vantage point on the interaction between language learning and metalinguistic awareness and take into account the sociolinguistic imbalances that characterize bilingual communities of this type. The subjects who participated in the study were speakers of Spanish and Náhuatl from Central Mexico. Assessments of metalinguistic awareness related to different aspects of the children's consciousness of the languages they spoke or understood were compared to a series of assessments of reading comprehension, writing, and oral narrative in both languages. Findings suggest directions for further research along the following lines: metalinguistic awareness is related to different aspects of literacy development in different ways, the key variables being the degree of decontextualization and expressive versus receptive language tasks.

The language and literacy skills of 21 children (aged 6;6), who were selected for linguistic precocity at age 1;8, are reported here. Verbal abilities remained high, and in contrast to the findings at 4;6 (reported in Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992), reading achievement is now at a superior level. Overall, the results are consistent with a two-phase model of reading development, in which the second phase is more closely related to language ability than the first. Phonological awareness, as indexed by a phoneme deletion task, appears to emerge as a consequence, rather than a cause, of early reading. There also appears to be a complex relationship among early interest in reading, instruction, and reading development. Differences in child interest in books and book reading may evoke variation in literacy-relevant experiences.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

Teachers’ language practice during shared book reading may significantly affect the rate and outcome of early language proficiency. The current study has focused on 37 kindergarten teachers and 440 4- to 5-year-old kindergartners during their shared book reading sessions in Singapore, exploring teachers’ variation in instructional strategies and linguistic features, and its relations with children’s language development and teacher’s background. Results demonstrated that teacher’s language strategies and linguistic features varied considerably. Instructional strategies with a medium level of cognitive load were found to be positively related to children’s growth in receptive vocabulary and word reading skills. Teacher’s lexical sophistication was found to be positively associated with children’s vocabulary size. Years of teaching experience was revealed to predict teacher’s variation in medium-level instructions.

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves greater computational complexity. An analysis of spontaneous language samples of 18 French-speaking adolescents with SLI, compared to groups of typically developing speakers, showed that whereas complexity increases with age in the latter, behaviors of avoidance are clear in the former, in the form of low frequencies of complex structures, but also frequency of failed attempts and alternative strategies. Whereas increasing complexity is the hallmark of syntactic development after childhood, avoidance of complexity appears to characterize SLI after childhood.

This research was designed to explore whether maintenance of the ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions requires specific linguistic/perceptual experience, or whether broadened but nonrelevant linguistic experience can result in generalized perceptual flexibility. To explore this question, bilingual and trilingual adult subjects were compared to monolingual English adults on their ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions that are not used in (any of) their native language(s). Results suggest that broadened, nonspecific linguistic experience does not contribute to increased perceptual flexibility.

This study investigated the hypothesis that children with a reading disability understand and use sound-spelling correspondence rules less frequently in spelling than children with other learning disabilities and normally achieving children. To test this hypothesis, spelling errors of children between the ages of 6 and 16 with a reading disability (RD), an arithmetic disability (AD), and normally achieving children (NA) were examined. Two groups of children with an arithmetic disability were included: those with good spelling skills (AD-good), and those with poor spelling skills (AD-poor). The accuracy of the spelling errors according to sound-spelling correspondence rules (phonological accuracy) of the children was determined using both a constrained system (inclusion of position cues) and an unconstrained system (in which positional cues were irrelevant). The visual similarity of the error to the target word was also determined. The RD group at all ages produced significantly fewer phonologically accurate misspellings than the children with normal achievement scores, whether the constrained or the unconstrained scoring system was used. The AD-poor spellers and the RD group produced significantly fewer phonologically constrained, accurate misspellings than the NA group. Using the unconstrained measure, the AD-poor spellers at the youngest age level displayed as much difficulty using rudimentary sound-symbol conversion rules as the RD group, while at the older age levels, they did as well as the NA group. AD-good spellers performed as well as the NA group on both measures at all age levels. Children who were good readers and spellers (Good RS) were compared with children who were poor readers and spellers (Poor RS) and with children who were good readers and poor spellers (Mixed RS). Mixed RS produced significantly more phonologically and visually accurate misspellings than Poor RS. In summary, subtypes of learning-disabled children use spelling strategies that are significantly different from each other. RD children have the most difficulty acquiring the knowledge of soundspelling correspondence rules that are necessary for English spelling skills. The performance of AD children depends on the complexity of the scoring system, age, and spelling ability. Those students whose knowledge of sound-spelling correspondence rules is sufficiently well developed for reading but not for spelling (good readers/poor spellers) develop their phonetic skills more slowly than the good readers/good spellers. The understanding and use of phonological rules varies according to the subtype of learning disability, with children with a reading disability performing the most poorly at all age levels.

This study examines the contribution of early phonological processing (PP) and language skills on later phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), as well as the links among PA, MA, and reading. Children 4–6 years of age with poor PP at the start of school showed weaker PA and MA 3 years later (age 7–9), regardless of their language skills. PA and phonological and morphological strategies predict reading accuracy, whereas MA predicts reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that children with poor early PP are more at risk of developing deficits in MA and PA than children with poor language. They also suggest that there is a direct link between PA and reading accuracy and between MA and reading comprehension that cannot be accounted for by strategy use at the word level.

Learning disabled children have been found to be less likely than nondisabled children to request clarification of ambiguous messages provided by adults. This study tested a strategy deficit hypothesis as one source of this conversational deficit by assessing the effects of a brief intervention which highlighted the appropriate response strategy, i.e., question-asking. Learning disabled and non-disabled children in grades four, five, and six played the listener role in a referential communication task requiring them to select referents based on messages varying in informational adequacy. Although group and grade differences replicated previous findings, the intervention condition had no effect on the children's performance on a posttest. An analysis of referent selections indicated that the inactive listeners were overrelying on the Maxim of Quantity, the Gricean principle that cooperative speakers provide informative messages. These results suggest that conversational development depends on children's increasing ability to recognize contexts in which these conversational principles do not apply.

In this study, Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals used brief English contexts to choose among possible meanings for unfamiliar words. Two types of errors were compared: transfer errors, which were answers consistent with Spanish, but not English, syntax, and nontransfer errors, which were inconsistent with the syntax of both languages. Nontransfer errors were found to be negatively correlated with reading proficiency in both Spanish and English. Transfer errors, on the other hand, were positively correlated with reading proficiency in Spanish and were unrelated to reading proficiency in English.