The beauty of edited volumes is their potential to achieve synergism in bringing together diverse work on a significant topic – not just to create a coherent collection of research. Literacy in African American communities succeeds on all fronts. In presenting a broad view of literacy-related practices, the volume evokes a variable African American community that is invisible (or at least hazy) in many schools. Without deep knowledge of the linguistic, cultural, historical, and political contexts for literacy in the community, the schools and university programs that prepare professionals cannot hope to overcome the deficit perspective of cultural and linguistic differences that still drives assessment and instruction to a large degree.

Phonological similarity effects are biases to judge words as phonologically similar (i.e., rhyming), even if they are not. First found in rime awareness tasks in preliterates, these biases have recently also been found in proficient adult readers. In this study, we evaluated underlying phonological processing in rime judgment longitudinally, across literacy development. To this end, we created a new rime judgment task (rime; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /z∙aɪ̯∙l/) with two distractor conditions that varied in size of phonological overlap (body; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /t∙aɪ̯ ç/; nucleus; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /r∙aɪ̯∙s/). The task was administered to a group of 61 German-speaking children at four time points across school entry and to 21 adults. Accuracy and latency responses were recorded. Results indicated that children and adults showed phonological similarity effects but the effect decreased gradually over time. However, preliterate children were more sensitive to large compared to small phonological overlap, while the same effect was significantly smaller in literate children and adults. Results suggest that preliterate children are more sensitive to larger grain sizes and become more sensitive to fine-grained units across literacy development. The findings are in line with the assumptions of the psycholinguistic grain size theory.

Familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, memorability, and vividness of visual imagery ratings, on 7-point scales, were collected for 536 Spanish action-related sentences, including a corpus of 439 phrases originally normed in Swedish, German, and Croatian (Arar & Molander, 1996; Molander & Arar, 1998; Molander, Arar, Mavrinac, & Janig, 1999) and 97 new sentences describing actions usually performed using different body postures and face or hand movements. These norms constitute the only available set of ratings for action sentences in Spanish including those dimensions to date, and they allow for the design of studies aimed at empirically exploring the relationship between action, language, and cognition with well-controlled materials in Spanish-speaking samples of participants.

Taking as a premise that phonological working memory (PWM) influences later language development, in their keynote article, Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan aim to specify the relations between early language input and the development of PWM in terms of separable influences of timing, quantity, and quality of early language input. We concur that prior work has established that PWM and language development have reciprocal influences on one another during development (e.g., Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Gathercole, 2006; Gathercole, Hitch, Service, & Martin, 1997; Metsala & Chisolm, 2010). The goal of the keynote article was to describe how early language experience may influence the development of PWM. Pierce et al. argue that this can be done by comparing the development of PWM across groups of children with differing language experiences during early childhood, specifically (a) delayed exposure to language, (b) impoverished language input, or (c) enriched language input. The authors suggest that this comparison may contribute to establishing that individual differences in PWM are due, in part, to early language experience. Sensitive periods for phonological development that are open roughly in the first year of life are discussed, and it is suggested that the quantity and quality of early language input shapes the quality of phonological representations. Efforts to specify mechanisms by which early language input may influence the development of PWM have both theoretical and, potentially, clinical importance. Considering this, Pierce et al.’s article, which aims to create a platform for future research in terms of the timing, quantity, and quality of early language input, is a valuable contribution.

Theory and research pertaining to relationships between oral and written communication offer support to seemingly contrary hypotheses regarding the development of informational adequacy in speech and in writing. Because the social cognitive demands of face-to-face interaction are less complex than those of prototypical written communication, younger children might be expected to display greater audience adaptation in speech. On the other hand, the process of encoding in writing facilitates certain cognitive operations, and, therefore, children might be expected to communicate more effectively in writing. Empirical studies warranting conflicting conclusions, however, have administered tasks that tap different communication functions, either explanatory or referential. The present study replicates and extends this previous research by administering referential and explanatory communication tasks in both speech and writing to children at three grade levels. In addition, an independent measure of social cognitive ability was administered. Results confirmed increasing differentiation with age between speech and writing, with fifth graders displaying greater informational adequacy in writing. Children's performance in written communication, rather than speech, revealed a dependency on social cognitive ability. Differences between referential and explanatory communication suggested by previous research were confirmed.

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of English articles by three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tongue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of children's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that the Chinese children's acquisition of the definite article differed from- what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with English as first language learners and second language learning children of other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-holding phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indefinite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition pattern already reported for children learning English as a first language or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holding, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specific second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived from a universal referential strategy for learning articles.

This book by Carson Schütze poses an important question. Are grammaticality judgments a reliable source of data for linguistic theories? Grammaticality judgments, reliable or not, have been the main, and most often the only, source of data in linguistic theory for many years. “‘Because many of the relevant structures are fairly complex and simply might not arise in the normal course of conversation, or during observation by an experimenter' (White, 1989, p. 58), UG [Universal Grammar] researchers have generally relied on some form of grammaticality judgment (GJ) task” (Katrien & Lantolf, 1992, p. 32). Katrien and Lantolf (1992) pointed out that with this task linguists try to draw on speakers' intuitions about their competence. Grammaticality judgments consist of questions about whether a sentence is grammatical according to native speakers. Most often, the native speaker is the linguist her- or himself as the only subject. Not only can bias exist when linguists are the source of data for her or his own theories, but also relying on the intuitions of only one speaker limits the credibility of the theory. When more than one speaker is queried, it has been shown that consistency is not always guaranteed: variation among and within speakers is a common feature in judgments (Mohan, 1977; Snow & Meijer, 1977). Idiosyncrasies of the subjects, presentation of the material, and experimenter's procedure are among the factors that contribute to this variation in judgments. An underlying problem in linguistic theorizing comes from the fact that linguists are normally not “trained in methods for getting reliable data” (p. 4). All this results in theories that are not adequately supported. Nonetheless, they are used as a springboard for new theories. Schütze provides linguists with answers to the following questions. What information about language can grammaticality judgments offer? What factors affect the form of these judgments? What can be done to make the best use of these judgments?

The Keynote Article is a very welcomed, timely, and incisive review article that examines theoretical and clinical implications of research on bilingual development and specific language impairment (SLI). Paradis provides a considered examination of the available evidence and takes into account a number of potential influencing factors. In particular, I want to commend her discussion of potential compensatory mechanisms that may play a role in bilingual development in SLI. This is often a neglected area in discussions concerning SLI. I also want to highlight that I agree wholeheartedly with her conclusion that the evidence to date “leans toward a positive attitude toward dual language learning for children with SLI who are in a supportive context for bilingualism.” This message is by no means universally accepted, nor is it put into action in therapeutic contexts across the United Kingdom and Europe. There is still much debate as to what type of advice should be given to parents and what the target language or languages of therapy should be (Harulow, 2008). This review article has therefore the potential not only to make a significant contribution to theory but also to practice.

Bringing together lines of research from sentence processing and lexical access, this empirical study investigates the interplay between lexical (grammatical gender) and syntactic (word order) cross-linguistic overlap in L2 German. Eighty-six L1 Spanish-L2 German and thirty-six monolingual German adults completed a German self-paced reading task with noun phrases (NPs) manipulated by L1-L2 gender congruency (congruent, incongruent, neuter) and L1-L2 adjective-noun word order (pre- vs. postnominal adjectives). The study examines the effects of gender congruency, the type of L1-L2 gender mapping (i.e., presence vs. absence of each class in L1 and L2), and L2 proficiency level. Results show that the detection of ungrammatical word order in L2 German interacts with gender congruency, in that L2 speakers are only sensitive to word order violations for sentences with gender-congruent nouns. The detection of ungrammaticality for sentences containing gender-incongruent nouns only emerges at higher L2 proficiency levels. These findings underscore the role of cross-linguistic lexical overlap in syntactic processing.

Bilingual children typically perform more poorly than monolingual children on linguistic tasks but better than monolingual children on cognitive tasks requiring executive function. The present study examined performance on complex linguistic tasks that also required executive functioning for their solution. One hundred 4-year-olds from linguistically diverse backgrounds (36 monolinguals, 64 bilinguals) performed two linguistic tasks in which misleading information needed to be ignored to select the correct answer. Data were analyzed both categorically by comparing the performance of children assigned to monolingual and bilingual groups and continuously in terms of degree of bilingual experience across the entire sample. In the categorical analyses, bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in understanding the meaning of spoken sentences in the presence of distraction in both tasks, and continuous analyses showed that performance was calibrated to degree of bilingualism in one of the tasks, with higher levels of bilingualism being associated with better performance. The interpretation is that attentional control built up through bilingual experience compensates for lower levels of language proficiency in performing these complex linguistic tasks. The study also endorses the use of continuous assessments of bilingualism rather than categorical assignment to groups to obtain more nuanced results.

This study compared patterns of nonselective cross-language activation in L1 and L2 visual word recognition with different-script bilinguals. The aim was to determine (1) whether lexical processing is nonselective in the L1 (as in L2), and (2) if the same cross-linguistic factors affected processing similarly in each language. To examine the time course of activation, eye movements were tracked during lexical decision. Thirty-two Japanese–English bilinguals responded to 250 target words in Japanese and in English. The same participants and items (i.e., cognate translation equivalents) were used to directly compare L1 and L2 processing. Response latencies as well as eye movements representing early and late processing were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. Similar cross-linguistic effects, namely cognate word frequency, phonological similarity, and semantic similarity, were found in both languages. These factors affected processing to different degrees in each language, however. While cognate frequency was significant as early as the first fixation, effects of cross-linguistic phonological and semantic similarity arose later in time. Increased phonological similarity slowed responses in L2 but speeded them in L1, while greater semantic overlap was facilitatory in both languages. Results are discussed from the perspective of the BIA+ model of visual word recognition.

This Special Issue of Applied Psycholinguistics raises not only several issues about the human brain's behavior as manifest in the processing of language, but it is also intended to elicit scientific dialogue.

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.