We examined the growth trajectories of reading in a consistent orthography (Greek) in two developmental periods (from Grade 1 to Grade 4 and from Grade 4 to Grade 10) and what cognitive skills predict the growth patterns. Seventy-five Greek-speaking children were assessed in Grades 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10 on word-, nonword-, and text-reading fluency. In Grades 1 and 4, they were also assessed on phonological awareness, rapid naming, phonological memory, orthographic knowledge, and articulation rate. Results of growth curve modeling showed that during the first developmental period, there was a rapid initial growth from Grade 1 to Grade 2 followed by a less rapid growth from Grade 2 to Grade 4. In the second developmental period, the slow growth continued. In both developmental periods, rapid naming and orthographic knowledge predicted the initial status of all reading outcomes and phonological memory predicted the initial status of nonword-reading fluency. Phonological awareness predicted the initial status of nonword-reading fluency in the first developmental period and the initial status of word- and text-reading fluency in the second developmental period. None of the cognitive skills predicted the growth rate in reading skills. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

How do violations of predictability and plausibility affect online language processing? How does it affect longer-term memory and learning when predictions are disconfirmed by plausible or implausible words? We investigated these questions using a self-paced sentence reading and noun recognition task. Critical sentences violated predictability or plausibility or both, for example, “Since Anne is afraid of spiders, she doesn’t like going down into the … basement (predictable, plausible), garden (unpredictable, somewhat plausible), moon (unpredictable, deeply implausible).” Results from sentence reading showed earlier-emerging effects of predictability violations on the critical noun, but later-emerging effects of plausibility violations after the noun. Recognition memory was exclusively enhanced for deeply implausible nouns. The earlier-emerging predictability effect indicates that having word form predictions disconfirmed is registered very early in the processing stream, irrespective of semantics. The later-emerging plausibility effect supports models that argue for a staged architecture of reading comprehension, where plausibility only affects a post-lexical integration stage. Our memory results suggest that, in order to facilitate memory and learning, a certain magnitude of prediction error is required.

This study explores the adjustment of Greek remigrant students in Greek public schools after their families' return to Greece from the Federal Republic of Germany. Teacher and self-rating instruments were used, and achievement and language competence data were obtained. The sample consisted of 13- to 15-year-old junior high school students in northern Greece. The remigrant students were divided into two groups (“early return” and “late return”), based on the year of return to Greece. The control group consisted of all the local classmates of these students. Remigrant students (mainly late return) were found to experience difficulties mainly in the language/learning domain and less in the interpersonal and intrapersonal behavior domains.

This study considered the accuracy of perception and production of the compound-phrasal contrast by Vietnamese-Australians learning English and examined phonological, demographic, and speaker normalization factors that might influence acquisition of the contrast. In the study, 32 Vietnamese subjects took part; their performance on the perception part of the study was compared to that of 32 native English-speaking Australians. Complexity of phonological environment, in terms of number of syllables and consonant clusters alien to Vietnamese phonology, and length of residence in Australia were found to be the major factors influencing both the perception and production of the contrast. Accuracy of perception and production were highly correlated. Australian subjects, while performing significantly better than Vietnamese subjects on the perception task, nevertheless demonstrated the same pattern of accuracy across different levels of phonological complexity as had the latter.

This investigation focused on early school-aged children's ability to negotiate shared reference in a task-oriented communication game. Conversational partners worked together on initiating and refining mutually acceptable referential labels for a series of abstract figures. Each child participated as both a sender and a matcher. In Experiment 1, developmental trends in the use of conversational strategies such as utterance-contingent queries, acknowledgments, and negations were observed. However, communicative efficiency was disrupted when the children switched dyadic roles. They reintroduced figures with novel labels when switching to a speaking role from a previous matching role, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, communicative efficiency was again disrupted at the point of role switch, even when the children were given feedback designed to minimize cross-role inconsistency. Interestingly, in both experiments, communicative inefficiency did not reduce a dyad's overall communicative success. These results suggest that, while children are in the process of learning how best to coordinate the use of conversational strategies and procedural rules, they still manage effective communication, albeit with a little extra effort.

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun–noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the children described the meaning of conventional noun–noun compounds. The SLI and AM groups did not differ in parsing the nouns, but the SLI group was poorer at explaining the semantic relationships between them. Compared to vocabulary mates, a larger proportion of the SLI group successfully parsed the compounds but a smaller proportion could explain them. These difficulties may reflect problems in the development of links within the semantic lexicon.

Two current issues in research on first language (L1) attrition among adoptees are explored: whether adoptees have lost their L1 completely and whether relearning can help them recover their L1 if it is not completely lost. These issues are investigated by examining whether Swedish monolingual Korean adoptees’ preexisting knowledge of L1 Korean has an impact on their relearning of Korean as adults. The results suggest that Korean adoptees’ early L1 experience has left traces of the language and that these traces can have an effect on their phonetic perception when relearning the language. The finding that reexposed adoptees performed better than native Swedish learners indicates that the greatest impact on retrieving L1 knowledge comes from relearning. Given the lack of the statistically significant findings, the results demonstrate possibilities but remain open to discussion.

A total of 130 young adults and 173 older adults gave goodness of fit ratings for sets of word alternatives for 123 English sentence frames. Word alternatives were semantically plausible in all cases but varied in the likelihood of their occurrence within the sentence frames. Adding support to the general belief that vocabulary and language knowledge are well preserved in normal aging, our results showed generally high agreement in goodness of fit ratings by the young and older adults. Differences that did occur appeared to be due to cohort differences in word usage and interests rather than underlying cognitive function. We suggest that this similarity in semantic judgments may help to explain why adult age differences in comprehension and memory for sentences are generally smaller than age differences for other examples of episodic memory.

Language samples elicited through a picture description task were recorded from 38 adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and one control group matched on age, and another matched on age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. The samples were coded for use of various types of inferences, dramatic devices, and verbal fillers; acoustic analyses of prosodic features were carried out, and an independent group of judges provided global ratings of the overall expressiveness of the language. In addition, a standardized measure of social adaptive functioning was administered to the parents of the participants with WS. The findings revealed distinctive developmental trends in the use of expressive content and prosodic patterns by adolescents and adults with WS that were not evident among the controls. Ratings of expressiveness by naive judges of the speech samples produced by the participants with WS were related to parent evaluations of adaptive social communication skills; however, the verbal productions of this group were not judged to be significantly more expressive than those of controls.

In 1990 Gathercole and Baddeley proposed a strong hypothesis that has generated a wealth of research in the field of language development and disorder. The hypothesis was that phonological memory, as indexed by nonword repetition, is causally related to vocabulary development. Support for the hypothesis came from an impressive range of longitudinal, correlational, and laboratory training studies, and from studies of specific language impairment (SLI). However, more recently, Gathercole, Tiffany, Briscoe, Thorn, and The ALSPAC Team (2005), directly tested the causal hypothesis by following a cohort of children from age 5 to 8 years. Contrary to prediction, children with poor nonword repetition abilities at age 5 had normal vocabulary at the age of 8.

A group of Finnish-speaking children with specific language impairment (N = 15, M age = 5 years, 2 months [5;2]), a group of same-age typically developing peers (N = 15, M age = 5;2), and a group of younger typically developing children (N = 15, M age = 3;8) were compared in their use of accusative, partitive, and genitive case noun suffixes. The children with specific language impairment were less accurate than both groups of typically developing children in case marking, suggesting that their difficulties with agreement extend to grammatical case. However, these children were also less accurate in making the phonological changes in the stem needed for suffixation. This second type of error suggests that problems in morphophonology may constitute a separate problem in Finnish specific language impairment.

The present study investigates the role of the syntactic properties of the first and the target language on second language (L2) learners’ production of English main and embedded clause questions. The role of the first language (L1) was investigated by comparing the production of L2 learners whose L1s (Chinese and Spanish) differ from English and each other in terms of word order in main and embedded clause questions. The role of the target language was investigated by comparing L2 learners’ production of yes/no and adjunct and argument wh-questions. The results indicate that the L1 is not a predictor of L2 learners’ production patterns for either main or embedded clause questions. The linguistic properties of the target language, on the contrary, predict learners’ accuracy and inversion profiles. In line with data from the English L1 acquisition literature, L2 learners produced higher inversion rates in main clause yes/no than in wh-questions, and particularly low inversion rates with why-questions. In line with data from nonstandard varieties of English and preliminary evidence from L1 acquisition, L2 learners produced higher nonstandard inversion rates in embedded clause wh-questions than in yes/no questions. Taken together, these results highlight that L2 production is affected and constrained by the same factors at play in L1 acquisition and dialectal variation.

Previous research conducted with early learning French–English bilinguals suggests that, at the individual word level, the development of segmentation is best characterized in terms of a parameter-setting theory of language acquisition in which French segmentation is marked relative to English segmentation. The present study, which is conducted with late learning French–English bilinguals, finds evidence for parameter setting but with a directionality of markedness opposite that found by others. Support in favor of these findings is discussed.

Because the Japanese phonetic script (i.e., kana) represents moraic units, it is often claimed that Japanese people assemble phonology at the moraic unit. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the unit for naming visually presented stimuli, focusing on the special nasals /N/, geminates /Q/, long vowels /R/, and dual vowels /J/. The special sounds create two morae when there is only one syllable. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the production of three-mora, three-syllable and three-mora, two-syllable real, and nonsense words. The findings indicated that native Japanese speakers named the three-mora words containing the special sounds more quickly. Accordingly, it is posited that special sounds are named as syllable units rather than moraic units.

To acquire a new word, learners need to create its representation in phonological short-term memory (STM) and then encode it in their long-term memory. Two strategies can enable word representation in STM: universal segmentation and phonological mapping. Universal segmentation is language universal and thus should predict word learning in any language, while phonological mapping is language specific. This study investigates the mechanisms of vocabulary learning through a comparison of vocabulary learning task results in multiple languages. We tested 44 Polish third graders learning English on phonological STM, phonological awareness in Polish and in English, and on three tasks, which involved learning novel word forms in Polish (first language), in English (second language), and in a language that did not resemble any language known to participants (an unknown language). Participants’ English proficiency was controlled through a vocabulary task. The results suggest that word learning engages different mechanisms for familiar and unfamiliar languages. Phonological awareness in English predicted learning second language and unknown language words, and phonological STM predicted learning words of the unknown language. We propose that universal segmentation facilitates word learning only in an unfamiliar language, while in familiar languages speakers use phonological mapping in order to learn new words.

The current study examined the effect of story presentation rates on story recall performance in 35 individuals with Down syndrome and 3 control groups (35 mental age matched, 35 syntax comprehension matched, and 35 syntax production matched children). Three short audiotaped stories were presented to each individual at three different rates (normal, storyteller [slow with expressive inflections], and slow rate). The effect of group but not rate was significant. Individuals with Down syndrome recalled more content words than the production-matched group and the production-matched group recalled fewer content words than the mental age matched and comprehension-matched groups. The results were interpreted in relation to working memory deficits in individuals with Down syndrome, developmental change in story recall of typically developing children, and the contribution of syntax comprehension to story recall.

A rather robust literature exists that views children's language development in the context of interactions with adults. This literature generally focuses on typically developing children and suggests that joint attention facilitates communication development whereas directives do not. In order to understand the crucial features of input supporting language acquisition, research must examine children in less than optimal conditions, including children with chronic otitis media (OM). Controversy exists regarding the outcomes of children with OM, and we argue that parental input is an important factor often neglected in research that may mediate language outcomes. The current study investigates whether parents interact differently with their 12-month-old children based upon children's OM status. The results indicate that parents of chronically affected children direct attention more often and engage in fewer joint attentional episodes than parents of nonchronically affected children. Findings suggest that chronic OM has a localized affect on attentional interactions, the forms of input consistently implicated in language acquisition. Thus, children with OM may receive less than optimal input than peers.

It is well established that syntactic form and communicative function do not always correspond: for instance, a syntactic question might function as a request for information (“did you see the play?”) or a request for acknowledgment when there is no doubt about polarity of the response (“there's a tower at Blackpool, isn't there”). Using data from a corpus of 18 child–adult conversations, we distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response differed according to the communicative function of the utterance. Nonverbal and prosodic responses (e.g., nods or “mmh”) were significantly more likely to occur in response to utterances soliciting acknowledgment than in response to yes/no questions that solicited information. There were consistent form–function relationships for responses as well as for soliciting utterances. Nonverbal nods and headshakes were not functionally equivalent to verbal “yes” and “no.”

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels “colored” by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was intended to elicit the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component, a negative deflection typically seen at central midline scalp sites about 200 ms after the presentation of a “deviant” acoustic stimulus occurring among a train of “standard” acoustic stimuli. VV coarticulation at near and medium distances was associated with significant MMN-like effects, which however were not observed in response to the longest distance coarticulatory contrasts. Subjects' ERP results did not predict their performance on the behavioral task, which found evidence of listener sensitivity to even the furthest distance coarticulatory effects. Although the MMN has previously been shown to be sensitive to phonemic contrasts, this is the first study using ERP methodology to investigate the subphonemic processing associated with the perception of coarticulation.

This study investigated whether individual differences in receptive vocabulary, speech perception and production, and nonword repetition at age 2 years, 4 months to 3 years, 4 months predicted phonological awareness 2 years later. One hundred twenty-one children were tested twice. During the first testing period (Time 1), children’s receptive vocabulary, speech perception and production, and nonword repetition were measured. Nonword repetition accuracy in the present study was distinct from other widely used measures of nonword repetition in that it focused on narrow transcription of diphone sequences in each nonword that differed systematically in phonotactic probability. At the second testing period (Time 2), children’s phonological awareness was measured. The best predictors of phonological awareness were a measure of speech production and a measure of phonological processing derived from performance on the nonword repetition task. The results of this study suggest that nonword repetition accuracy provides an implicit measure of phonological skills that are indicative of later phonological awareness at an age when children are too young to perform explicit phonological awareness tasks reliably.