We investigated the relationship between lexical activation and syntactic planning in children's sentences. Four- and 7-year-old children described transitive scenes following patient-related prime pictures and control pictures. We examined syntactic choices, and compared onset latency, sentence length, and dysfluency rates for active transitive sentences in the two conditions. Early activation of the patient in the primed condition did not lead to the production of patient-subject sentences, but it did have consequences for active transitive sentence production. Namely, onset latencies were longer and sentences were shorter in the primed condition. Dysfluency rates did not differ between the two conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a stronger pattern of association between working memory scores and language variables in the patient-primed condition. The results indicate that conflicts between lexical activation order and syntactic plans are a source of processing difficulty during children's sentence production.

The present study investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children are able to process garden-path constructions in real time when the working memory burden associated with revision and reanalysis is kept to minimum. In total, 25 4-year-olds, 25 5-year-olds, and 30 adults were tested using the visual-world paradigm of eye tracking. The obtained eye gaze patterns reflect that the 4- and 5-year-olds, like the adults, committed to an initial misinterpretation and later successfully revised their initial interpretation. The findings show that preschool children are able to revise and reanalyze their initial commitment and then arrive at the correct interpretation using the later-encountered linguistic information when processing the garden-path constructions in the current study. The findings also suggest that although the 4-year-olds successfully processed the garden-path constructions in real time, they were not as effective as the 5-year-olds and the adults in revising and reanalyzing their initial mistaken interpretation when later encountering the critical linguistic cue. Taken together, our findings call for a fine-grained model of child sentence processing.

The Basque version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (BCDI-1) can be used to evaluate 8–15-month-old children’s receptive and expressive verbal skills, as well as nonverbal gesture production. This paper reports on data of 1002 children of an extended age range obtained with the BCDI-1 as a proxy measure of Basque children’s communicative competence up to 24 months. Statistical analyses revealed a large effect of age on four BCDI-1 scales: phrases understood, production of gestures, receptive vocabulary, and expressive vocabulary, while sex, amount of exposure, educational level, and birth order showed small or no effect. The strong effect of age as well as the high between-scale correlations confirmed the advantage of using the BCDI-1 instrument for the extended age range.

Research has demonstrated that positive and negative moods may differently affect semantic processing due to the activation of mood-dependent thinking. Interestingly, recent studies have indicated that the interplay between mood and semantic processing may also be modulated by the language of operation (native [L1] vs. second language [L2]). Still, it remains an open question if and how mood interacts with varying depths of semantic processing, particularly in bilinguals. Here, we show that a negative mood may differently modulate shallow and deep semantic processing in bilinguals at a behavioral level. In two experiments, Polish–English bilinguals, induced into positive and negative moods, performed a lexical decision task (marking shallow semantic processing; Experiment 1) and a semantic decision task (marking deep semantic processing; Experiment 2) with sentences in L1 and L2 of varying semantic complexity: literal, novel metaphoric, and anomalous sentences. While no interactive mood–language effect was observed for shallow semantic processing, we found faster semantic judgments when bilinguals were in a negative relative to positive mood in L2, but not L1, for deep semantic processing. These findings suggest that a negative mood may activate more analytical and effort-maximizing thinking in L2, yet only when the linguistic content requires deeper understanding.

This study was undertaken as a sequel to DePaolis (1991) to explore the role of sonority in constraining the word identification errors of normal listeners. The data from 9 subjects from DePaolis's study were used to examine the phonological relationships, defined by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (Jespersen, 1904), between response errors and stimulus targets - a methodology previously employed in the analysis of target-related neologisms (Christman, 1992b, 1994). The present study found that, although sonority may constrain onset-driven word-search processes, sonority and lexical phonostatistics may constrain coda-driven word-search processes. These findings are consistent with those obtained from the productive errors of aphasic subjects (Christman, 1994). Taken together, the results of these studies support a role for sonority in phonologically based aspects of word identification and word production.

This meta-analysis of 31 studies aimed to determine the effectiveness of perception-based high variability phonetic training (HVPT) for second language (L2) production learning and to identify learner-related and methodological variables that influence production gains. Based on independent effect sizes for 43 within-participant and 17 between-participant designs, small-to-medium effects of post-training improvement were found. The average production gains for trained items and untrained items were 10.50% and 4.50%, respectively. Neither strong support for long-term retention of production learning nor generalization to untrained stimuli was observed, however. Moderator analyses showed that post-training production gains were influenced by a number of factors related to learner profiles (age and learning context), training features (provision of phonetic information, training duration, and training time per session), and features of production tests (elicitation tasks, prompt modality, and outcome measures). The relationship between perception and production gains was negligible at the participant level, but was significant and moderate at the level of individual studies for post-training and retention data. These findings provide partial support for a perception-production link. This study makes several recommendations for future studies investigating the effects of HVPT on L2 speech production learning.

In a recent paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, Stein, Cairns, and Zurif (1984) demonstrate that reading disabled children perform at a less advanced level relative to normals of the same age in comprehending a number of complex sentence types, including sentences with temporal adverbial clauses, such as (1): 1. The pig kissed the cow after jumping over the fence. (Please see erratum page at back of this issue for the corrected figures concerning this sentence from the Stein, Cairns, and Zurif article.)

While adults require the (missing) subject of jump in (1) to be interpreted as coreferential with the main clause subject (the pig in the example), normal children are frequently 6 or older before they develop this restriction, permitting a direct object NP (the cow in the example) to be made subject of (to control) the temporal clause. Stein et al. demonstrate that reading disabled children are slower than normals to develop the adult rule, a finding that generalized over both their comprehension of written and spoken language. In what follows, I point out some difficulties with the analysis of the adult grammar and normal development that Stein et al. adopt, and speculate on alternative ways of dealing with the facts of grammar and development for sentences of type (1). To the extent that these speculations are correct, our view of the nature of deficits may also be changed.

Exposure to statistical patterns of language use affects language production and comprehension. In this longitudinal study of English language learner (ELL) university students, we examined the interplay between language experience and language statistics as a window into the formation and stability of morphological representations in memory. We hypothesized that within-participant change in sensitivity to distributional properties of complex words on written production would reflect changes in morphological knowledge. At two timepoints, separated by 8 months of language exposure, a sample of ELLs (n = 196) completed a written suffix completion task. The largest gains in production accuracy were observed for derived words ending in less productive suffixes. In addition, across both timepoints we found a consistent effect of derivational family entropy, such that derived words belonging to morphological families with equally dominant members were less accurately produced. Both effects indicate that ELLs exploit distributional cues to morphological structure and shed light on two aspects of morphological knowledge in ELLs. First, knowledge of suffixes becomes more entrenched in memory, independently of knowledge of the full forms of derived words. Second, ELLs draw upon interlexical connections between morphological family members during written word production.

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a very common childhood disorder that is characterized by impairments in expressive and/or receptive language regarding different modalities. Part V of the German version of the Token Test was evaluated as a potential screening tool for the early detection of SLI. Forty-five male and 16 female monolingual native German-speaking preschoolers with SLI (4–6 years) and 61 age- and gender-matched typically developing controls were examined with a German version of the Token Test and an established intelligence measure. Token Test performance was significantly worse in preschoolers with SLI including greater group differences at age 4 than at ages 5 and 6. Analyses showed a detection rate of 77% for Part V of the Token Test in the whole sample as well as 85.1% at age 4, 80.6% at age 5, and a nonsignificant detection at age 6. Correctly detected preschoolers with SLI showed significantly worse performance than typically developing controls regarding nonverbal and verbal intelligence, numeracy, problem solving, working memory, visual attention, and memory. Children with SLI show worse Token Test performance, whereas at ages 4 and 5, Part V of the Token Test could potentially serve as a screening tool for the detection of SLI.

Although many researchers appeal to performance limitations to account for children’s non-adult-like use of language, few studies have explicitly linked specific cognitive abilities to specific dimensions of language. This study investigated a well-studied underextension in children’s language involving linguistic aspect and tested participants in an aspectual comprehension task as well as a series of assessments evaluating neurocognitive and linguistic skills. Adults (N = 32) and 5-year-old children (N = 32) participated. The results for the children replicated the classic pattern of underextension, with children showing an uneven pattern of success even though all items were equally grammatical. In addition, children’s skill with items that involved overriding lexical information in favor of morphological information was predicted by their performance on an inhibitory control task while children’s skill with items that involved integrating contextual world knowledge was predicted by their performance on a receptive vocabulary task. These results demonstrate how specific dimensions of linguistic processing are supported differentially and sensibly by specific dimensions of cognition.