The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbitnominative … the carrotaccusative eatfuture vs. the fast rabbitaccusative … the foxnominative eatfuture) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children’s early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children’s morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.

The unintelligible speech of many developmentally delayed children poses problems for language intervention and language assessment efforts. Eighteen developmentally delayed children in Brown's (1973) stage I and their parents participated in two studies of the relationship between verbal routines and the intelligibility of developmentally delayed children's speech. The first study demonstrated that more intelligible child speech was found in routines than in nonroutines. To determine if routine utterances were articulated more accurately than nonroutine utterances, the second study extracted a representative sample of routine and nonroutine utterances from their visual and discourse contexts and asked two naive observers to transcribe them. To investigate the possible effect of contextual information, the naive observers transcribed the extracted utterances under context-information-present and context-information- absent conditions. The results indicated that extracted utterances were more intelligible under context-information-present conditions. The results were interpreted as indicating that child speech was more intelligible in routines than nonroutines because routines provide adults with more context information for interpreting ambiguous child utterances.

This study is an investigation of the patterns and strength of the connections between English dative verbs and the double object dative (DOD) argument structure in native speaker production. The subjects completed three written production tasks using dative and other verbs from different semantic classes of verbs. The results show that alternating dative verbs varied in their patterns of connection to argument structures, but were consistent in the strength of their connection to the DOD argument structure across subjects and tasks. There was no support for production differences due to verb class membership, but the results do support a model of lexical representation that represents variable strengths of association between individual verbs and argument structures. With respect to the design of production and processing studies, the results do not support the treatment of alternating dative verbs as a unitary group, nor a priori assumptions about relative argument structure complexity between alternating and nonalternating verbs, but do support the use of production tasks to determine individual verb argument structure preferences.

Linguists have described the English vocabulary as including Latinate and basic subsystems. In three experiments with a total of 93 participants, we asked whether skilled readers are sensitive to graphotactic differences between these systems. Participants saw pairs of nonwords and were asked to choose the item in each pair that appeared more wordlike. Participants were more likely to select an item with an onset and an ending that suggested the same system than an item with a mismatch. Participants also used the presence of a single versus double medial consonant as a marker of the system to which an item belongs. The results suggest that skilled readers have learned about some of the graphotactic differences between Latinate and basic words and do not treat English as a monolithic system.

The present study sought to obtain initial data on children's use of the clitic pronoun se in Romance (e.g., Se cayó ‘He/she fell’) and regular (e.g., Se peinó ‘He/she combed himself/herself’) reflexive constructions. A total of 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 4 years were given two structured tasks that assessed the contrastive use of se for coding these functions. In addition, spontaneous speech data were obtained on the children's use of this clitic pronoun. To establish expected adult-like performance on the Romance reflexive task, responses from 20 Spanish-speaking adults were obtained. The results suggest that there is a differential order of acquisition of the clitic se, whereby children initially contrast regular reflexive with nonreflexive clitic constructions and later contrast between Romance and non-Romance reflexive verb pairs. Possible reasons for this difference in use are presented as these relate to issues of lexical development and the language's marking of transitivity.

American 5-year-olds and adults learned to label various spatial relationships using four Japanese locatives that coincided or partially overlapped in meaning with the locative prepositions into, onto, out of, and off.

Subjects' generalization of the Japanese words was pre- and post-tested to determine if locatives that were semantically (and to a small extent phonemically) similar to their English equivalents would yield better transfer than terms that deviated in meaning and phonemic structure from English. Results confirmed for children only that generalization was differentially affected following lexical training. Adults generalized all four Japanese words with equal accuracy and showed significantly better transfer than children on all but one locative.

Lexical interference initially accounted for many adult and child substitution errors, but did not explain child errors on the post-test. Findings did not agree with predictions that semanticphonemic differences between English and Japanese locatives would adversely affect transfer of the Japanese lexicon to novel exemplars of these terms. Results did confirm, however, that adults learned the Japanese lexicon faster and better than the 5-year-olds.

This study investigated the triple-deficit hypothesis in Arabic, a Semitic transparent orthography, among 258 native Arabic children from Grade 3, divided into a typical readers group (n = 204) and a dyslexia group (n = 54). Children were tested on word- and pseudoword-reading accuracy, word-reading fluency, phonological awareness (PA), naming speed (NS), orthographic processing (OP), and nonverbal reasoning ability. The results indicated that all children with dyslexia had either double or triple deficits, and none of them had a single deficit. Children with triple deficits showed lower performance than children with single and no deficits on all the reading measures. They have also lower performance to children with double deficits on word-reading accuracy but comparable scores in word- and pseudoword-reading fluency. In addition, OP was confirmed as an additional independent predictor of word-level reading skills besides PA and NS, while controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. The classification findings showed that the presence of a triple deficit maximizes the risk of reading failure. These findings support the additive nature of combined deficits in PA, NS, and OP. Moreover, they establish the benefit of including OP as a third deficit, in addition to PA and NS, underlying dyslexia in Arabic.

Knowledge of the environmental and genetic etiologies of complex cognitive disorders can guide strategies for diagnosis, prevention, and therapy, but disentangling the various causes can be very challenging. Two basic approaches can be used in identifying genetic factors, a top-down approach, in which phenotypic descriptions are used to discover genes that influence those phenotypes, and a bottom-up approach, comparing the phenotypic effects of genes that are known to cause syndromes that include cognitive disabilities. Thorough characterization of phenotypes throughout development is critical to both of these methods. These strategies have been applied to the characterization of genetic etiologies for reading disability, language disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism.

The current study examines how bidialectalism influences non-native speech production. We compared monodialectal Mandarin Chinese with bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin Chinese speakers in terms of their ability to produce easy and difficult American English vowels. The results showed a general advantage for the bidialectal group compared with the monodialectal group in the production of the vowel formants and duration of the easy English vowels [i] and [u]. However, for the English vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ] known to be difficult for Chinese learners of English, both groups experienced the same challenges in terms of accurately producing the formants of the target vowels. Nevertheless, the bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin speakers were still better than the monodialectal Mandarin speakers in the durational aspect of the two difficult English vowels. The results are explained by the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model and suggest that the bidialectal advantage in non-native speech acquisition is subject to the modulation of cross-linguistic difficulty of the target speech sounds.

Processing speech can be slow and effortful for children, especially in adverse listening conditions, such as the classroom. This can have detrimental effects on children’s academic achievement. We therefore asked whether primary school children’s speech processing could be made faster and less effortful via the presentation of visual speech cues (speaker’s facial movements), and whether any audio-visual benefit would be modulated by the presence of noise or by characteristics of individual participants. A phoneme monitoring task with concurrent pupillometry was used to measure 7- to 11-year-old children’s speech processing speed and effort, with and without visual cues, in both quiet and noise. Results demonstrated that visual cues to speech can facilitate children’s speech processing, but that these benefits may also be subject to variability according to children’s motivation. Children showed faster processing and reduced effort when visual cues were available, regardless of listening condition. However, examination of individual variability revealed that the reduction in effort was driven by the children who performed better on a measure of phoneme isolation (used to quantify how difficult they found the phoneme monitoring task).

The majority of refugees are children and youth and their integration and life-course transitions are a research priority. This paper examines the timing of refugee children and youths’ entrance into the labour market and family formation (marriage/common law union and parenthood). It does so by examining how admission category, knowledge of a host country’s official languages, and age at arrival shape their transition to adulthood. Using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Immigration Database and Heckman selection estimation, the paper finds minimal variation in refugee children and youths’ entry into the labour market compared to children of other immigrant streams. It also finds that refugee children and youth start forming families at a younger age than children of economic class immigrants, but at an older age than family class children. The analysis also shows limited effects of knowledge of official language prior to arrival while age at arrival has a robust impact on their adulthood transitions. These findings shed light on the unique patterns of life-course transition among refugee children and youth and contribute to a better conceptualization of their experiences relative to children and youth of other immigrants.

Learning the sounds of letters is important for learning to decode printed words and is a key component of phonics instruction. Some letter sounds are easier for children than others, and studies of these differences can shed light on the factors that influence children’s learning. The present study examined knowledge of the sounds of lowercase letters among children in England, where a government-mandated curriculum specifies the order in which letter sounds should be taught and where letters’ sounds are taught before the names. The participants were 355 children from Nursery (mean age 4 years, 4 months), Reception (mean age 5 years, 4 months), and Year 1 (6 years, 4 months) classes. When order of teaching was statistically controlled, children did better than expected on the initial letter of their first name and worse on visually confusable letters. Unlike the North American children in previous studies, they did not perform better on letters that had their sounds at the beginning of their names than on other types of letters. The sonority and the age of acquisition of the letter’s sound were also not influential. Implications for letter teaching, particularly for children at risk of literacy problems, are discussed.

The orthographic forms (spellings) of second language (L2) words and sounds affect the pronunciation and awareness of L2 sounds, even after lengthy naturalistic exposure. This study investigated whether instruction could reduce the effects of English orthographic forms on Italian native speakers’ pronunciation and awareness of L2 English sounds. Italians perceive, produce, and judge the same sound as a short sound if it is spelled with one letter and as a long sound if it is spelled with a digraph, due to L1 Italian grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules whereby double consonant letters represent long consonants. Totally, 100 Italian learners of English were allocated to two conditions (final n = 88). The participants in the explicit GPC (EGPC) condition discovered English GPC rules relating to sound length through reflection, explicit teaching, and practice; the participants in the passive exposure condition practiced the same words as the EGPC participants, but with no mention of GPCs. Pre- and postintervention production (delayed word repetition) and phonological awareness (rhyme judgment) tasks revealed no positive effects of the instruction. GPC instruction appears to be ineffective in reducing orthographic effects on L2 phonology. Orthographic effects may be impervious to change, whether by naturalistic exposure or by instruction.

We introduce the pair of special issues of Applied Psycolinguistics (this issue, next issue) titled “Towards a just and equitable applied psycholinguistics.” This paper motivates the need for this project, details the editorial process, and provides a brief summary of each article appearing in the special issues.

Verbal working memory (VWM) deficits are common in individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD) but are not well understood. This study evaluated how both memory and language production factors influence VWM performance in children and adults with DLD, focusing on the influence of serial position, phonological activation (PA), and lexical frequency. Participants were 30 children with DLD and 26 with typical language, and 21 adults with DLD and 23 with typical language. The participants completed a listening span task in which they were asked to recall the final words of sentences in sets of increasing size. Responses (dependent variable) were coded as correct, incorrect, or no response. Final words were coded for frequency, serial position within the set, and PA (number of occurrences of the initial phoneme, vowel, and whole word in the task). These variables, along with age and language status, were entered as predictors in mixed-effects multinomial regression models. Extreme serial position, greater PA, and higher frequency reduced incorrect and no responses. These effects were attenuated for the DLD group, and the effect of greater PA varied with set size. The findings suggest that for individuals with DLD, VWM performance is affected by more limited effective language experience and by the dynamic task demands.

It has been found that bilinguals and children from minority backgrounds lag behind monolinguals or those in the majority culture, with respect to prevalence, assessment, and treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This suggests that bilingualism might be yet another factor giving rise to variability in ADHD. Using regression methods, we analyzed parent reports for 394 primary school-age children on background and language experience, ADHD-related behavior, and structural language skill in English to explore whether bilingualism is associated with levels of ADHD-related behavior. Bilingualism as a category was associated with slightly lower levels of ADHD-related behavior. Bilingualism as a continuous measure showed a trend of being associated with lower levels, but this did not quite reach significance. Structural language skill in English was the main predictor of levels of ADHD-related behavior; higher skill predicting lower levels. More investigation is required to confirm whether these effects occur across different populations, to understand which, if any, aspects of bilingualism give rise to variability, and if need be, to address these as far as possible.

This study aimed at examining the contribution of affective content to the organization of words in the lexicon. Based on existing free association norms and on a series of questionnaires we developed, we examined the characteristics of the words produced as associates to 840 Spanish cue words. Half of them were affective words and the other half were neutral (non-affective) words. Among the affective cue words, some words directly labeled an emotion (emotion words, EM) and others did not label an emotion but could elicit it (emotion-laden words, EL). The words produced as associates were also classified according to this distinction. Furthermore, we examined the relationship between the lexico-semantic and affective properties of the cue words and the associated words. The results revealed that EM, EL, and neutral associated words were elicited to a greater extent by cue words of the same type than by other types of cue words. Furthermore, the degree of correspondence between the affective properties of the cues and their associates was higher than that of lexico-semantic variables. These results have methodological implications for research on semantic memory and are of interest for applied studies focused on affective word organization in specific populations.

This article investigated the development of phonological encoding in speech production by examining the production of reiterant two-word sequences varying in phonological similarity. Two groups of typically developing children and a group of college-aged adults participated. Both groups of children produced target words with longer durations when they were preceded by words sharing initial consonant–vowel (CV) sequences than when preceded by phonologically unrelated words or words sharing vowel–consonant (VC) sequences. For adults, the duration of target words was shorter when they were preceded by words sharing final VC sequences than in the other conditions. The developmental decrease in the influence of CV-related prime words on target-word duration may be related to changes in the level of activation of lexical items during speech production. Developmental changes in the influence of VC-related prime words are less clear, but may be due to age-group specific behavior in the production of identical sequences of words.

Previous research provides evidence about a relationship between the quality of questions and the depth of processing of an input. If questions about a subject matter are asked in a certain way, students are likely to process it in depth. In this article, inputs, question levels, and depths of processing are described. Three categories of coding were defined through observation of secondary classrooms in Zaire: (a) reproducing words (rote), (b) reproducing content (comprehension 1), (c) generating new content (comprehension 2). After teacher training emphasizing student comprehension, statistically significant shifts from Category 1 behavior to Category 2 and 3 behavior were observed in the experimental classes. It is suggested that surface or deep processing can be induced by manipulating certain dimensions of inputs and questions.

Previous research has documented conflicting findings regarding the effect of word frequency on spelling in older adults. The current study examines spelling in Hebrew, in which it is easier to define the type of likely misspellings in each word. Younger and older Hebrew speakers spelled 120 single words that differed in word and letter frequency. Results show that all participants made more phonological substitutions of target letters on low-frequency words and on words with low-frequency letters. Yet, younger adults had a lower percentage of correct responses than did older adults, especially on low-frequency words. Vocabulary knowledge eliminated this age effect. We suggest that aging leads to greater reliance on full lexical retrieval of spelling instead of on sublexical phoneme-to-grapheme processing, due to years of exposure to written language, increase in vocabulary, and consolidation of orthographic representations.