Johanne Paradis' Keynote Article can be read as a concise critical review of the research that focuses on the sometimes strained relationship between bilingualism and specific language impairment (SLI). In my comments I will add some thoughts based on our own research on the learning of Dutch as a second language (L2) by children with SLI.

The present study examined Korean mothers’ literate mediation strategies and socioemotional supports for 84 4- and 5-year-old children as they wrote unfamiliar words, and the relation of these strategies and comments to Korean children's Hangul reading. The mother–child writing interactions were videotaped. Eight strategies of maternal literate mediation were subsequently identified and five socioemotional comments were coded. Mothers of 5-year-olds used a coda-focused (i.e., emphasis on the final consonant of a syllable) strategy more often than those of 4-year-olds. The maternal coda focus was uniquely associated with children's word reading over and above mothers’ education and children's age, grade, vocabulary, and writing skill. Maternal literate mediation focused on the consonant–vowel (CV) subsyllabic unit, which explained children's reading of CV Gulja (Korean written syllable). These results suggest that efficient maternal literate mediation strategies focus on salient psycholinguistic grain size of Korean language such as CV (body) and coda subsyllabic units. In addition, the two socioemotional categories of process and critical comments were uniquely associated with children's reading. Findings underscore the importance of Korean language and culture in mothers’ early scaffolding to facilitate children's literacy acquisition.

We examine the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in Spanish–English bilingual adults, in contexts in which social–communicative cues (looking-only or looking-and-pointing) are used. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that pronoun interpretation is guided by the first-mention bias, which is modulated by the presence of the social–communicative cues both in monolinguals and in bilinguals. In Experiment 2, we show that if the speaker using the social–communicative cues is a non-native speaker of English, bilinguals rely more strongly on the social–communicative cues than monolinguals. Experiment 3 shows that stronger reliance on social–communicative cues in bilinguals’ interpretations is not the result of more accurate speech comprehension. Our results demonstrate that the ability to utilize the looking-only and looking-and-pointing cues is not driven by a superior ability to accurately read social cues in bilingual adults. In addition, monolinguals show lower sensitivity to the speaker’s intent when the speaker is a non-native speaker of English.

Research has suggested that children who speak African American English (AAE) have difficulty using features produced in Mainstream American English (MAE) but not AAE, to comprehend sentences in MAE. However, past studies mainly examined dialect features, such as verbal -s, that are produced as final consonants with shorter durations when produced in conversation which impacts their phonetic saliency. Therefore, it is unclear if previous results are due to the phonetic saliency of the feature or how AAE speakers process MAE dialect features more generally. This study evaluated if there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used the auxiliary verbs was and were, a dialect feature with increased phonetic saliency but produced differently between the dialects, to interpret sentences in MAE. Participants aged 6, 5–10, and 0 years, who spoke MAE or AAE, completed the DELV-ST, a vocabulary measure (PVT), and a sentence comprehension task. In the sentence comprehension task, participants heard sentences in MAE that had either unambiguous or ambiguous subjects. Sentences with ambiguous subjects were used to evaluate group differences in sentence comprehension. AAE-speaking children were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use the auxiliary verbs was and were to interpret sentences in MAE. Furthermore, dialect density was predictive of Black participant’s sensitivity to the auxiliary verb. This finding is consistent with how the auxiliary verb is produced between the two dialects: was is used to mark both singular and plural subjects in AAE, while MAE uses was for singular and were for plural subjects. This study demonstrated that even when the dialect feature is more phonetically salient, differences between how verb morphology is produced in AAE and MAE impact how AAE-speaking children comprehend MAE sentences.

For some time now, psycholinguistic research has involved the study of sex differences in language development. Overall, girls seem to have an early advantage over boys, mainly in regard to vocabulary, which appears to decrease and, eventually, vanish with age. While there are numerous studies on sex differences in the acquisition of vocabulary as well as grammar, early sex differences in phonological short-term memory (PSTM) have been mostly neglected, or if research was conducted, it resulted in null findings, for the most part. In the present study, we examined sex differences in language competence (in a wide array of linguistic domains) of German children 4 years of age. Several tests were administered to assess articulation, vocabulary, grammar, speech comprehension, and, most importantly, PSTM (by means of the repetition of non-words and sentences). Girls performed better than boys in all domains, although some effect sizes were small. Most importantly, we found evidence for a female advantage in PSTM performance. Furthermore, mediation analyses revealed that the obtained sex differences in articulation, vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension were partially or fully mediated by (sex differences in) PSTM.

Speech intelligibility in a multitalker background can be affected by the language of both the talker and the interfering speech. This study investigated whether this interaction is modulated by dialect variations of the same language. American English listeners were presented with target sentences in either their own General American English (GAE) or a different accent (Southern American English [SAE]) masked by either GAE or SAE two-talker babble at three sound to noise ratios (SNRs): +3, 0, and –3 dB. All speech materials were produced by male talkers. Across all conditions, SAE target was more intelligible than GAE. Intelligibility of either target decreased as the level of the interfering babble noise increased. Target accent interacted with masking accent: at +3 dB SNR, GAE (and not SAE) was the more effective masker. The target-masker interaction was different as listening conditions deteriorated: at 0 and –3 dB SNR, masking accent did not affect GAE target, but when the target was SAE, the SAE masker (and not GAE) was more effective. Thus, at increased noise levels, listeners benefited from the mismatch between the target and masking accents only when the target was in a nonnative accent. These results demonstrate that dialect variation can influence listeners’ performance in a multitalker environment. The apparent asymmetry in intelligibility of accents may be in part related to dialect-specific prosodic and phonetic features.

Relatively little is known about the importance of phonological and orthographic processing skills for reading and spelling in monolingual and bilingual adults. We compared these underlying skills, using a series of phonological and orthographic tasks, in English monolingual (n = 28), English first language and Chinese second language bilingual (n = 21), and Chinese first language and English second language bilingual adults (n = 22) who were equally proficient in reading and spelling English, and examined the contributions of these skills to English word reading and spelling for each group. The results showed group differences in phonological processing, with English monolingual adults having better phonological skills than both groups of bilingual adults. No significant group differences were found for orthographic processing. Regression analyses showed phonological skills were a unique predictor of English word reading for both bilingual groups, but not for the English monolingual group. Orthographic skills were a significant predictor of English word spelling, but only for the English monolingual adults. This suggests there may be a long-lasting influence of being exposed to two contrasting languages on skills underlying literacy in bilingual individuals.

Although researchers generally agree that native speakers (NSs) process formulaic sequences (FSs) holistically to some extent, findings about nonnative speakers (NNSs) are conflicting, potentially because not all FSs are psychologically equal or because in some studies NNSs may not have fully understood the FSs. We address these issues by investigating Chinese NSs and NNSs processing of idioms and matched nonidiom FSs in phrase acceptability judgment tasks with and without think-alouds (TAs). Reaction times show that NSs processed idioms faster than nonidioms regardless of length, but NNSs processed 3-character FSs faster than 4-character FSs regardless of type. TAs show NSs’ understanding of FSs has reached ceiling, but NNSs’ understanding was incomplete, with idioms being understood more poorly than nonidioms. Although we conclude that idioms and nonidioms have different mental statuses in NSs’ lexicons, it is inconclusive how they are represented by NNSs. TAs also show that NNSs employed various strategies to compensate for limited idiom knowledge, causing comparable processing speed for idioms and nonidioms. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing subtypes of FSs and considering NNSs’ quality of understanding in discussions of the psychological reality of FSs.

Although the importance of prosody in processing information structure (IS) has been shown in many languages including English and Mandarin, the interacting effects of prosody with other linguistic systems, such as syntax, are relatively under-studied, especially in L2. This paper reports two question-answer appropriateness rating experiments, investigating intermediate-to-high proficiency Mandarin listeners’ integration of prosodic prominence and clefting cues in the interpretation of focus in their L1 and L2 (English). It was found that prosodic prominence was more effective than clefting as a cue to focus in L1 Mandarin. However, clefting was as effective as prominence in L2, showing L1–L2 differences in integrating multiple cues. The findings are discussed in terms of Mennen’s L2 intonation learning theory (2015) and Bates and MacWhinney’s Competition Model (1989), which provide a framework for understanding difficulties in acquiring the use of particular cues in L2. The current study contributes to our limited knowledge of a crucial part of L2 learning: how L2 learners process IS.

The present study addressed important gaps in the research literature on bilingual development by examining the effects of both mother's and father's education level and age at migration on children's bilingual vocabulary in two different age groups. The sample included 81 preschoolers and 92 preadolescents with two Turkish immigrant parents living in Norway. The children were born in Norway, or migrated to Norway before/at the age of 3. The children completed Norwegian and Turkish vocabulary tests during home visits while mothers provided information regarding both parents’ education and age at migration in structured interviews. Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that father's education significantly predicted all children's majority (Norwegian) vocabulary scores while mother's education significantly predicted majority vocabulary scores in the preschoolers. Father's education significantly predicted minority (Turkish) vocabulary scores among the preadolescents. Mother's, but not father's, age at migration significantly predicted preschoolers' majority vocabulary scores and preadolescents' minority vocabulary. Hence, the parental background variables predicted minority vocabulary scores only among the preadolescents, not the preschoolers. We conclude that mothers and fathers influence the minority and majority language skills of their bilingual children differently and that their influence varies depending on the age of the child.

This study examined mothers' accuracy in predicting the responses their children gave and the scores they achieved on two standardized vocabulary tests. Three groups of 16 mothers and their preschool children (specific language-impaired; age-matched, language-normal; and younger, language-matched, language-normal) completed the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, and Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. Mothers overestimated their children's standardized receptive and expressive scores, with the exception that the mothers' estimates of the receptive vocabulary scores for language-impaired children did not differ from the actual test scores. Mothers of age-matched normals were best able to predict the labels their children used to name various pictured items. However, the overall estimates by mothers of language-impaired children were more accurate than those by mothers of language-normal children.

Spoken word recognition, during gating, appears intact in specific language impairment (SLI). This study used gating to investigate the process in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders plus language impairment (ALI). Adolescents with ALI, SLI, and typical language development (TLD), matched on nonverbal IQ listened to gated words that varied in frequency (low/high) and number of phonological onset neighbors (low/high density). Adolescents with ALI required more speech input to initially identify low-frequency words with low competitor density than those with SLI and those with TLD, who did not differ. These differences may be due to less well specified word form representations in ALI.

This study assessed the prediction that individuals are able to use the knowledge from their first language (L1) in processing the comparable sound contrasts in an unknown language. Two languages, Arabic and Japanese, which utilize vowel duration contrastively, were examined. Native Arabic (NA) and native Japanese (NJ) listeners' discrimination accuracy for native (known) and nonnative (unknown) vowel length contrasts was assessed in an AXB discrimination test. A group of Australian English (OZ) speakers who do not know either Arabic or Japanese participated as a control group. Despite the expectation that native listeners positively transfer and generalize the L1 knowledge to process unknown languages with equivalent phonetic characteristics, both the NA and NJ groups were clearly less accurate in discriminating vowel length contrasts in unknown languages. Further, they showed no advantage over the OZ listeners who have limited experience with vowel length contrasts in their L1. These results suggest that, not only for stop place contrasts examined previously, but also for vowel length contrasts, experience with specific phonetic contrasts may not be sufficient for attaining truly nativelike discrimination accuracy.

Despite the importance of phonemic awareness in beginning literacy, several studies have demonstrated that adults, including teacher trainees, have surprisingly poor phonemic skills. Three experiments investigated whether adults' responses in phonemic awareness and spelling segmentation tasks are based on units larger than single letters and phonemes. Responses often involved large units, and they were influenced by sonority and syllable structure. Participants who performed a phoneme counting task before a spelling segmentation task produced significantly more phoneme-based responses and fewer onset–rime responses than participants who first counted words in sentences. This training effect highlights the flexibility of adults' strategies. Although adults are capable of phoneme-based processing, they sometimes fail to use it.

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from distinct language communities, on bilingual language development, and on development in cases of language disorders in children. Paradis has taken the important step of carefully comparing the trajectories of two populations of children—children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children growing up bilingually—who both differ in interesting ways from normally developing monolingual children. Her Keynote Article highlights striking similarities and potential differences between these two groups. This Commentary focuses on three issues: what influences developmental profiles in language development, bilinguals' development of vocabulary and syntax, and assessment issues related to treating monolinguals as the “standard.”

It has been suggested that human communities that share their basic cultural foundations evince no remarkable differences concerning the characterization of core concepts. However, the small but existing differences among them reflect their sociocultural diversity. This study compares 219 concrete concepts common to both Spanish and English semantic feature norms in order to assess whether core features of concepts follow a universal or cultural language-specific pattern. Concepts were compared through a geometric technique of vector comparison in the Euclidean n-dimensional space alongside the calculation of the network’s degree of centrality. The role of cognate status was also explored by repeating the former analysis separating cognate from noncognate words. Taken together, our data show that languages are structurally similar independent of the cognate status of words, further suggesting that there are some sort of core features common to both languages.

We investigated the predictive processing of grammatical number information through stem-vowel alternations in German strong verbs by adult first language (L1) speakers and Dutch-speaking advanced second language (L2) learners of German, and the influence of working memory and awareness (i.e., whether participants consciously registered the predictive cue) thereon. While changed stem vowels indicate a singular referent (e.g., /ε/ in fällt3SG, “falls”), unchanged vowels indicate plural (e.g., /a/ in fallt2PL, “fall”). This target structure presents a challenge for L2 learners of German due to its subregularity and low salience. With their eye movements being tracked, participants matched German auditory sentences (VSO order) with one of two pictures, displaying identical action scenes but varying in agent number. The number cue provided by the strong verbs allowed participants to predict whether the upcoming subject would be singular or plural. The analyses revealed significant prediction, measured as predictive eye movements toward the target picture and faster button-press responses. Prediction in the L2 group was weaker than in the L1 group and present in the eye movement data only. Higher working memory scores were linked to faster predictive presses. Approximately half of the participants had become aware of the predictive cue, and being aware facilitated prediction to a limited extent.

This study examined the activation of first language (L1) translations in second language (L2) word recognition in a lexical decision task. Test materials included English words that differed in the frequency of their Chinese translations or in their surface lexical frequency while other lexical properties were controlled. Chinese speakers of English as a second language of different proficiencies and native speakers of English were tested. Native speakers produced a reliable lexical frequency effect but no translation frequency effect. English as a second language speakers of lower English proficiency showed both a translation frequency effect and a lexical frequency effect, but those of higher English proficiency showed a lexical frequency effect only. The results were discussed in a verification model of L2 word recognition. According to the model, L2 word recognition entails a checking procedure in which activated L2 words are checked against their L1 translations. The two frequency effects are seen to have two different loci. The lexical frequency effect is associated with the initial activation of L2 lemmas, and the translation frequency effect arises in the verification process. Existing evidence for verification in L2 word recognition and new issues this model raises are discussed.

Semantic factors affecting pronoun assignment were studied in a group of aphasie patients. Their ability to assign reference in sentences of the type John telephoned Bill because he needed some information was facilitated by the causal bias of the main verb known to influence the direction of pronoun assignment in normal speakers. The addition of gender constraints (e.g., John telephoned Sue because he needed some information) improved their performance as well. Explicit mention of the referent's name (e.g., John telephoned Bill because John needed some information) did not improve performance any more than did the addition of gender constraints. When these cues were eliminated so that pronoun assignment required a full syntactic analysis, their performance dropped to chance.