American Sign Language (ASL) and English differ in linguistic resources available to express visual–spatial information. In a referential communication task, we examined the effect of language modality on the creation and mutual acceptance of reference to non-nameable figures. In both languages, description times reduced over iterations and references to the figures’ geometric properties (“shape-based reference”) declined over time in favor of expressions describing the figures’ resemblance to nameable objects (“analogy-based reference”). ASL signers maintained a preference for shape-based reference until the final (sixth) round, while English speakers transitioned toward analogy-based reference by Round 3. Analogy-based references were more time efficient (associated with shorter round description times). Round completion times were longer for ASL than for English, possibly due to gaze demands of the task and/or to more shape-based descriptions. Signers’ referring expressions remained unaffected by figure complexity while speakers preferred analogy-based expressions for complex figures and shape-based expressions for simple figures. Like speech, co-speech gestures decreased over iterations. Gestures primarily accompanied shape-based references, but listeners rarely looked at these gestures, suggesting that they were recruited to aid the speaker rather than the addressee. Overall, different linguistic resources (classifier constructions vs. geometric vocabulary) imposed distinct demands on referring strategies in ASL and English.

We developed the Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behavior Checklist for Junior Secondary School Students (BCL-JS) for teachers to rate the frequency of 52 reading-related behavioral characteristics of Chinese secondary school students. An item factor analysis based on ratings on 947 students yielded seven distinct dimensions. In a separate sample of 90 students, the seven constructs of the BCL-JS significantly correlated with students’ performances on most literacy and reading-related cognitive measures, and differentiated adolescents with or without dyslexia. Discriminant analysis showed that the BCL-JS had a high rate of correct classification (82.2%). These findings support that the BCL-JS is a reliable screening tool for Chinese junior secondary school students at risk for dyslexia.

This study examined the effects of adult “recasting” in sign language on the acquisition of specific syntactic-semantic structures by six deaf children between 9 and 76 months who were primarily at the one-sign utterance stage of development. In “recast” replies in conversation, the child's utterance is redisplayed in an altered sentence structure that still refers to the central meanings of the first sentence. Syntactic-semantic structures targeted for input intervention by teachers and parents using recasts included subject–verb relations, attribution, negation, subject–verb–object relations, conjunction, and conditionality. Recasting triggered the acquisition of new syntactic-semantic structures in American Sign Language and English which were evident in the spontaneous production of previously non-used sign utterances.

This study examined adult English native speakers' processing of sentences in which pronominal case marking conflicts with word order. Previous research has shown that English speakers rely heavily on word order for assigning case roles during sentence interpretation. However, in terms of cue reliability measures, we should expect English pronominal case to be nearly as strong a cue as word order. The current study examined this issue by asking subjects to interpret grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in which case competes with word order. The results indicated that word order remains the strongest cue in English, even when the case-marking cue is available. However, for noncanonical word orders, the case-marking cue had a strong effect on sentence interpretation.

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers (HSs) on two types of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) as well as their corresponding confidence ratings. Data were collected from 75 native speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into three groups: Spanish monolinguals, Spanish-dominant HSs, and English-dominant HSs. An AJT targeting morphosyntax (Task 1) showed that all groups were affected by task stimulus, that is, they were significantly less accurate on the ungrammatical items. A lexically focused AJT (Task 2) revealed the tendency of HSs to accept complex words that are possible yet not attested. Confidence ratings on both tasks were very high overall, and there was a significant relationship between accuracy and confidence. Thus, the data question the assumption made in a number of previous studies that HSs suffer from a lack of certainty in their linguistic intuitions. Finally, between-group effects show that the Spanish-dominant HS group was not different from the monolingual group on Task 1, yet there were significant differences between all three groups on Task 2. By comparing morphosyntactic and lexical phenomena on two tasks administered in the same modality, this research contributes to the discussion of vulnerable domains in heritage language bilingualism.

Identifying individual words is an essential part of the reading process that should occur first so that understanding the structural relations between words and comprehending the sentence as a whole may take place. Therefore, lexical processing (or word identification) has received much attention in the literature, with many researchers exploring the effects of different aspects of word representation (orthographic, phonological, and semantic information of words) in word identification. While the influence of many orthographic and phonological factors in normal reading are well researched and understood (Rayner, 1998, 2009), the effect of semantic characteristics of a word in its identification has received relatively less attention. A complete account of lexical processing during normal reading requires understanding the role of word meaning in lexical processing. Currently, little is understood about whether and how the meaning of an individual word is extracted during early stages of word identification. This article primarily focuses on how word meaning contributes to the process of word identification.

The inevitable decline of cognitive function with aging and the high incidence of clinical impairment make understanding the process of cognitive decline and the search for remediation an urgent priority. However, in spite of massive efforts in research and development, the effectiveness of pharmacological treatments for cognitive impairment remains extremely limited (Zhu et al., in press). Therefore, there is growing interest in the set of lifestyle factors that serve to maintain cognitive function even in the presence of neuropathology. These factors, called cognitive reserve (Stern, 2002), include education, occupational status, socioeconomic class, and involvement in physical, intellectual, and social activities (Bennett, Schneider, Tang, Arnold, & Wilson, 2006; Stern et al., 1994). Bilingualism appears to be another potent source of cognitive reserve (Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009). For these reasons, a comprehensive review of the small but growing literature on bilingualism and cognition in aging is timely and scientifically important.

The cross-overs between monolingual–bilingual and typically atypically developing children are a goldmine for research on language development. The four permutations of language exposure and language abilities create “natural experimental conditions” for investigating the nature of the language capacity and how this is shaped by input in typical development, and importantly, in specific language impairment (SLI). Paradis has played a prominent part in identifying and exploring this rich source of evidence. Her Keynote Article provides a valuable review of findings from her own and others' research, a carefully considered evaluation of their compatibility with competing theories of language development, and an excellent catalyst for debate.

This research investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) orthographic effects on L2 phoneme perception. Twenty-five native English learners of Russian (n = 13) and Mandarin (n = 12) participated in an auditory phoneme counting task, using stimuli organized along two parameters: consistency and homophony. The learners more successfully counted phonemes in L2 words with consistent letter–phoneme correspondences (e.g., всё /fsʲɔ/, three letters/three phonemes) than in words with inconsistent correspondences (e.g., звать /zvatʲ/, five letters/four phonemes), indicating that L2 phoneme awareness is influenced by L2 orthography and that orthographic effects are not limited to the L1. In addition, the lack of any L1 homophone effects suggests that L2 orthographic effects overrode any potential L1 orthographic interference for these intermediate-level learners, suggesting orthographic effects may be language specific.

Baum and Titone's Keynote Article is a welcome addition to the ongoing and flourishing study of the neurocognitive effects of bilingualism. By focusing their review on executive control in bilinguals from the perspectives of both aging and neuroplasticity in general they have broadened our thinking in useful ways. Because my own research has focused on the early stages of aging and bilingualism in preschool and school-age children, I have chosen to comment on their review with reference to these kinds of learners. I will also focus on the language acquisition part of this discussion because at the heart of the issue is how and to what extent acquisition of more than one language affects cognitive development. My comments reinforce what I believe are important observations in their review and simultaneously seek to extend their call to expand our frames of reference in research on bilinguals even further.

In children and adults, naming an item sometimes interferes with later attempts to name other items. Adult speakers experience cumulative semantic interference, interpreted as the result of incremental learning. Studies to date have not examined whether incremental learning can also account for interference in children. This study examined context effects on picture naming in 3-year-old children, and investigated whether children, like adults, show interference that is semantically based and cumulative. Children named pictures from semantically homogeneous and mixed sets. Response latency, accuracy, and repetition errors were recorded. The results demonstrated a progressive slowing of responses in the semantically homogeneous condition that was greater than that observed for the mixed condition. There were no significant effects for accuracy. Repetition errors, although infrequent, patterned similarly to previous reports for adults. The results indicate that preschool-aged children experience cumulative semantic interference in naming, and suggest that incremental learning may account for interference effects across development.

The aim of the present study was to investigate how children and adults allocate cognitive resources to performing segmental encoding and monitoring in a dual-task paradigm and the response patterns of the primary and secondary tasks in the dual task. Participants were 20 children divided equally into two age groups (7–11 and 12–15 years) and 10 adults. The primary task required participants to monitor phonemic segments in a picture–written word interference paradigm while silently naming the pictures. The picture and distractor word were the same (replica), related (phoneme onset overlap), or unrelated. The secondary task required participants to make pitch judgments on tones presented at short (330 ms) or long (1130 ms) stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) from picture onset. Developmental differences were observed in both response times and percentage errors in the primary and secondary tasks. Slower responses to the primary task were evident at the long SOA, related condition. Slower response times to the tone decision task were evident at the short rather than the long SOA. The findings support the capacity sharing account of dual-task performance and suggest that dual-task costs during language planning are higher in children than in adults.

I commend Johanne Paradis not only for her interesting Keynote Article but also for the careful research that she has conducted along with her collaborators in the area of bilingual language development and disorders. Her contributions have been significant and are sure to shape our theoretical as well as clinical understanding of specific language impairment (SLI). In this Commentary, I focus on three issues. The first stems quite directly from ideas raised in the Keynote Article; the second and third deal with factors that we need to consider when conducting research involving comparison groups of bilingual and monolingual children with SLI.

In this study we examined syntactic ambiguity resolution in two different Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin, which are relatively similar grammatically but very different phonologically. We did this using four-character sentences that could be read using two, two-syllable sequences (2-2) or a structure where the first syllable could be read by itself. The results showed that when both potential readings were semantically congruent, Mandarin speakers had a strong preference for the 2-2 structure and they preferred that structure much more than Cantonese speakers did. We attribute this to Mandarin having a more dominant bisyllabic prosodic foot than Cantonese. When the 2-2 meaning was semantically incongruent, however, the alternative structure was preferred by both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. Overall, the results suggest that, in silent reading tasks and semantically neutral conditions, the prosodic foot is generated automatically and can affect syntactic choices when ambiguity arises.

This study deals with repentistas: oral poets in the northeast of Brazil, most of whom have had limited schooling. Twenty-four repentistas, 27 non-repentistas from a similar background, and 38 university students were given a rhyme production task. The repentistas produced about three times as many rhymes as the SES-matched non-repentistas and over one-and-a-half times as many as the students. They did not, however, differ significantly from the nonrepentistas or students in regard to auditory memory or phonological segmentation; they were similar to non-repentistas and considerably worse than students on tests of IQ and reading speed. Thus, the rhyming ability of the repentistas appears to be both highly developed and dissociated from certain other language skills.

There is a good deal of interest in the application of neurocognitive techniques to investigate the underpinnings of developmental language impairments (DLIs). Electrophysiological techniques such as electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography offer the promise of the ability to track brain activity with precision in time and space. This article describes a number of findings from studies of normal adults and children that are relevant to neurocognitive studies of developmental language impairments and outlines a series of challenges that should be met in order for electrophysiological measures to realize their promise.

This paper describes the next steps for establishing detailed, useful behavioral phenotypes and for moving forward in the study of the relationships among genes, the environment, and language disorders. Key issues are recognizing the continuum of language behaviors to accurately describe disorders and the spectrum of typical development. A coordinated plan with foundational studies that address definition, measurement, design, and analytical methods is needed. Researcher capacity must be increased, and a greater focus on communication across disciplines to successfully accomplish interdisciplinary research is required. Language is not static, even in disorders; thus, we must study change over time. It is necessary to think about behavioral phenotypes in terms of developmental trajectories. Finally, data sharing and ethical and legal issues must be addressed.

The current study investigated native English and native Arabic speakers’ phonological short-term memory for sequences of consonants and vowels. Phonological short-term memory was assessed in immediate serial recall tasks conducted in Arabic and English for both groups. Participants (n = 39) heard series of six consonant–vowel syllables and wrote down what they recalled. Native speakers of English recalled the vowel series better than consonant series in English and in Arabic, which was not true of native Arabic speakers. An analysis of variance showed that there was an interaction between first language and phoneme type. The results are discussed in light of current research on consonant and vowel processing.