We use a longitudinal design to examine associations for a diverse sample of 2,120 Danish 16- to 30-month-old children between early expressive vocabulary and later reading and math outcomes in the sixth grade. Educational outcomes, in particular decoding and reading comprehension, can be predicted from an early vocabulary measure as early as 16 months with effect sizes (in proportion of variance accounted for) comparable to 1 year's mean growth in reading scores. The findings confirm in a relatively large population-based study that late talkers are at risk for low educational attainment because the majority of children experiencing early language delay obtain scores below average in measures of reading in the sixth grade. Low scores have the greatest predictive power, indicating that children with early delays have elevated risk for later reading problems.

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing and grade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of children produced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional word writing, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measures of grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling for general intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variables in accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills (phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental print exposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained all the variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case of reading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergarten writing appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factors underlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.

This is an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, and concepts about print in 3-year-old children. Forty–three normally developing children were given four tests of language development; twelve metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and structural awareness; and two measures of literacy knowledge. The results clearly demonstrated that most 3-year-olds can make metalinguistic judgments and productions in structured tasks, with overall metalinguistic performance improving with age in months. Specific metalinguistic tasks varied in difficulty and probably in developmental order. The major domains of metalinguistic awareness (phonological, word, and structural) were significantly intercorrelated and also correlated with overall linguistic skill. Literacy knowledge was positively correlated with overall metalinguistic skill and, specifically, with phonological awareness. It is concluded that, as young as age 3, children are already rapidly developing a mental framework for analyzing language structure separately from language meaning

The study examined the impact of the phonemic and lexical distance between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and a spoken Arabic vernacular (SAV) on phonological analysis among kindergarten (N=24) and first grade (N=42) native Arabic-speaking children. We tested the effect of the lexical status of the word (SAV, MSA, and pseudoword), as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme (SAV vs. MSA), on initial and final phoneme isolation. Results showed that, when words were composed of SAV phonemes only, the lexical status of the word did not affect phoneme isolation. However, when MSA and pseudowords encoded both SAV and MSA phonemes, kindergarteners found MSA words significantly more difficult to analyze. Comparing children's ability to isolate SAV versus MSA phonemes revealed that all children found MSA phonemes significantly more difficult to isolate. Kindergarteners found MSA phonemes that were embedded within MSA words even more difficult to isolate. Results underscore the role of the lexical status of the stimulus word, as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme in phonological analysis in a diglossic context.

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) the same age are reviewed in light of predictions from a maturational model of SLI. Studies examining the linguistic characteristics of bilingual children with SLI compared to monolinguals with SLI and their bilingual peers with typical development are reviewed in light of predictions of limited processing capacity theories of SLI. It is shown that data from bilingual children pose interesting challenges to both theoretical perspectives, although in different ways. Finally, the findings from this research are discussed in terms of their relevance for assessment of SLI in bilingual children.

Categorical perception of a synthetic /r/-/l/ continuum was investigated with Japanese bilinguals at two levels of English language experience. The inexperienced Japanese group, referred to as Not-experienced, had had little or no previous training in English conversation. The Experienced Japanese group had had intensive training in English conversation by native American-English speakers. The tasks used were absolute identification, AXB discrimination, and oddity discrimination. Results showed classic Categorical perception by an American-English control group. The Not-experienced Japanese showed near-chance performance on all tasks, with performance no better for stimuli that straddled the /r/-/l/ boundary than for stimuli that fell in either category. The Experienced Japanese group, however, perceived /r/ and /l/ categorically. Their identification performance did not differ from the American-English controls, but their overall performance levels on the discrimination tests were somewhat lower than for the Americans. We conclude that native Japanese adults learning English as a second language are capable of Categorical perception of /r/ and /l/. Implications for perceptual training of phonemic contrasts are discussed.

This article describes a follow-up of 25 boys diagnosed as having specific expressive language delay (SELD) in the 24- to 31-month age period. At the time of diagnosis, all subjects had Bayley MDI scores above 85, Reynell Receptive Language Age scores within 4 months of their chronological age, and Reynell Expressive Language Age scores at least 5 months below chronological age; most had vocabularies of fewer than 50 words and few if any word combinations. At follow-up, 16 boys were 3 years old, 7 were 3½, and 2 were 4 years of age. When seen for follow-up, half the 25 boys still had very poor expressive language. These boys were speaking at best in short, telegraphic sentences, and many had moderately severe articulation disorders with quite poor intelligibility. The 12 boys with better outcome had a range of language skills. All spoke in sentences to some extent, and each displayed some mastery of early morphemes (prepositions, plurals, articles, progressive tense, and possessives). However, few if any of the children spoke in completely fluent, syntactically complex, and morphologically correct language. Problems with copula and auxiliary verbs, with past tense inflections, and with pronouns seemed especially common. This research suggests that children with SELD at 24 to 30 months are at considerable risk for continuing language problems.

The literature to date suggests that the best predictor of early reading ability, phonological awareness, appears to be associated with the acquisition of letter-sound and vocabulary knowledge and with the development of well-defined phonological representations. It further suggests that at least some aspects of phonological awareness critically depend upon literacy exposure. In this study of 4- to 6-year-olds, we examine whether aspects of the home literacy environment are differentially associated with phonological awareness. Parental responses to a questionnaire about the home literacy environment are compared to children's awareness of rhyme and phonemes, as well as to their vocabulary, letter knowledge, and performance on measures of phonological strength (nonword repetition, rapid naming skill, phonological distinctness, and auditory discrimination). The results showed that a teaching focus in the home literacy environment and exposure to reading-related media are directly associated with phoneme awareness and indirectly associated via letter knowledge and vocabulary. Exposure to reading-related media and parents' active involvement in children's literature were also directly and indirectly linked with rhyme awareness skills via their association with letter and vocabulary knowledge.

This study tests the claim that children acquire collections of phonologically similar word forms, namely, dense neighborhoods. Age of acquisition (AoA) norms were obtained from two databases: parent report of infant and toddler production and adult self-ratings of AoA. Neighborhood density, word frequency, word length, Density×Frequency and Density×Length were analyzed as potential predictors of AoA using linear regression. Early acquired words were higher in density, higher in word frequency, and shorter in length than late acquired words. Significant interactions provided evidence that the lexical factors predicting AoA varied, depending on the type of word being learned. The implication of these findings for lexical acquisition and language learning are discussed.

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.

The logographic stage assumption in recent models of reading acquisition was examined by studying how German-speaking first graders read and spelled familiar words and matched pseudowords. Reading acquisition by German-speaking children provides an interesting case because the German writing system, in contrast to the English one, is phonologically rather transparent. To further test whether the transition from the logographic to the alphabetic stage poses a major obstacle at the beginning of reading, normally progressing first graders were contrasted with children who experienced serious difficulties at the beginning of reading and writing. In contrast to studies with American and British first graders, it was found that both normally progressing and delayed children relied on alphabetic strategies for both reading and writing, (a) Most children were able to read and - to a lesser extent - to spell completely unfamiliar pseudowords. (b) Reading of pseudowords correlated highly with reading of familiar words, and the same correlation was observed in the case of spelling, (c) Reading errors consisted mainly of nonwords beginning with the first letter(s) of the target, and most spelling errors consisted of spellings that were at least partially phonologically correct, (d) Reading performance was influenced by word exposure time, (e) Both reading performance and spelling performance were strongly predicted by knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These findings support the conclusion that a logographic strategy is of limited importance when the writing system is phonologically rather transparent and when the instructional approach does not withhold information about grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N=256) phoneme isolation: phoneme's linguistic affiliation (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars differed with respect to whether they included four critical Standard Arabic phonemes. Using a repeated-measure design, we tested children's phonemic sensitivity toward these four phonemes versus other phonemes. The results showed that the linguistic affiliation of the phoneme was reliable in explaining phoneme isolation reaffirming, hence the external validity of the linguistic affiliation constraint in explaining phoneme awareness in diglossic Arabic. The results also showed that initial phonemes and initial singleton phonemes were particularly difficult for children to isolate. These findings were discussed in light of a stipulated unique phonological and orthographic cohesion of the consonant–vowel unit in Arabic.

The purpose of this study was to investigate early literacy acquisition in a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences. It was considered that Turkish, with its systematic phonological and orthographic structure, would make different demands on the beginning reader than the languages used in many of the previous studies of literacy acquisition. First grade children were assessed using tests of phonological awareness, letter recognition, word and pseudoword recognition, spelling, syntactic awareness, and listening comprehension at the beginning of the school year. The impact of these factors on the development of word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension was examined. The results strongly suggest that a phonologically transparent orthography fosters the early development of word recognition skills, and that phonological awareness contributes to word recognition in the early stages of reading acquisition. Once the children's word recognition performance is high, listening comprehension ability distinguishes the different levels of reading comprehension among children. These patterns of results were interpreted as reflecting the phonological and orthographic characteristics of the Turkish language and orthography.

There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword speech are much more limited in scope (e.g., Braine, 1976). The present study represents an attempt to differentiate and test these models of early multiword speech: focusing on the syntactic category of determiner, we investigated the extent to which 11 children showed overlap in the contexts in which they used different determiner types in their early multiword corpora. The results demonstrated that, although children do use determiners with a semantically heterogeneous collection of different noun types, there is very little evidence that they know anything about the relationship between the different determiner types, and thus there is no real case for the attribution of a syntactic determiner category. Indeed, this pattern of determiner use seems perfectly consistent with a limited-scope formula account of children's early multiword speech, as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike determiner category may be a gradual process, one involving the progressive broadening of the range of lexically specific frames in which different determiners appear, and are broadly consistent with a number of recent constructivist models of children's early grammatical development.

Using a word order correction paradigm, we assessed syntactic awareness skills in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic ambiguity of the sentences. These findings support the view that poor comprehenders have language processing difficulties encompassing grammatical as well as semantic weaknesses, although their phonological processing skills are normal. The implications of such language weaknesses for the development of skilled reading are discussed.

Speech samples from twelve 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) were analyzed. The feature deficit hypothesis maintains that SLI children may produce morphological markers (e.g., plural -s) correctly, but they do not appreciate their role in marking grammatical features. Rather, they treat them as meaningless phonological variants. Findings from the present study were incompatible with this hypothesis: (a) production of morphological markers was not random; errors were unidirectional, in almost all cases involving omission of an inflection in an obligatory context; (b) overregularization errors were sometimes observed; (c) grammatical features differed in difficulty; (d) substitution of stems for inflected forms occurred with irregular as well as regular verbs; and (e) errors of pronoun case marking were common and always involved producing an accusative form in a context demanding the nominative. Children who used a specific inflectional form correctly in some utterances omitted it in others, suggesting a limitation of performance rather than competence. There were few obvious differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms, though there was a trend for grammatical errors to occur on words that occurred later in an utterance. It is suggested that slowed processing in a limited capacity system that is handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of grammatical morphemes.

Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English as well as native Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native Spanish early acquirers were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested except word order. Native Vietnamese early acquirers had difficulty with those aspects of English that differ markedly from Vietnamese. Native Vietnamese child acquirers had more generalized problems, similar to those of native Spanish late acquirers. Thus, native language appeared to make a difference for early acquirers, whereas a later age of acquisition caused a more general problem. A processing-based model focusing on the difficulty non-native language learners have in rapidly decoding surface form is offered as a possible explanation for both effects.

This study investigated the developing metalinguistic capabilities of Hispanic primary school children who are becoming bilingual but whose English reading achievement is below average. Two questions were posed: first, do native- and second-language vocabulary and degree of bilingualism contribute to performance on a metalinguistic task (defining words) and, second, do native- and second-language vocabulary and metalinguistic development at the word level significantly predict reading comprehension in the spring? The results showed that performance on the definition task in English and in Spanish was significantly explained by word knowledge in the language of the task; performance on the definition task in the other language (English or Spanish) but not degree of bilingualism contributed significantly, after the effects of vocabulary in the two languages were accounted for. Both native- and second-language vocabulary and phonological awareness independently contributed to achievement in English reading comprehension. The results suggest that, for children with limited native-language development in the early stages of bilingualism, vocabulary development in both the native and second language and metalinguistic development at the word level may be important education priorities because of their effects on second-language reading comprehension.

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed. After vocabulary, memory explained variance on the word-order correction task; in contrast, grammatical knowledge explained performance on the grammatical correction task. The relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension was mediated by vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory; in contrast, word reading and syntactic awareness shared unique variance not explained by these controls. The implications for how we measure syntactic awareness and its relation with reading ability are discussed.

This study examined the variables related to US immigrants' long-term attainment in English, their second language (L2), and their native language (L1). For 44 Mandarin–English bilinguals, with increasing age of arrival (AOA) in the United States, their accuracy in L2 grammaticality judgment tasks decreased and accuracy in an L1 grammaticality judgment task increased. Moreover, both AOA in the United States and mothers' English proficiency uniquely predicted a significant proportion of the variance for bilinguals' L2 proficiency. Finally, as a group, 72 speakers of three Asian languages showed lower levels of L2 proficiency and stronger AOA effects on the task performance than 32 speakers of six European languages. These differences in language proficiency were associated with differences in language use, language learning motivation, and cultural identification between the two groups. These findings suggest that L2 acquisition in the immigration setting is a complicated process involving the dynamic interactions of multiple variables.