There was an error in German Example (3b) on page 836 and an incorrect reference citation on page 853, both of which are reprinted herein. We regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.

The present study examined nonword repetition (NWR) and comprehension/production of single-word vocabulary in the majority language (English) in six- to eight-year-old English-Gaelic emergent bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE) (primary years 2 and 3). GMPE is an immersion education model found in Scotland where the minority language, Gaelic, is the language of instruction, whereas English is the majority community language, not supported in school in the first three years of primary schooling. All children spoke English as their first language (L1) and had varying exposure to the second language (L2) Gaelic outside the school setting. We investigated how individual factors, such as age and frequency of exposure, and psycholinguistic factors, such as task modality, word class (for vocabulary), frequency, length, and prosody (for NWR), influenced performance. Later exposure to Gaelic and higher nonverbal IQ were contributing predictors of performance for English vocabulary. For NWR, participants with earlier and longer exposure to Gaelic who also used both languages at home more performed significantly better on this task. These results suggest that minority language immersion education differentially affects majority language abilities; later L2 onset benefited L1 vocabulary learning, whereas earlier L2 onset boosted L1 NWR skills in these bilinguals.

In her Keynote Article, Paradis reviews evidence from bilingual language development to assess the claims of two opposing theoretical views of language disorders. Specifically, she examines the evidence for similarities in language profiles of typically developing (TD) sequential bilingual (second language [L2]) children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) with respect to Rice's extended optional infinitive (EOI) account. A limited processing capacity (LPC) account of SLI, Leonard's surface hypothesis, is evaluated within the context of comparisons among bilingual children with SLI, monolingual children with SLI, and TD bilingual children. Paradis concludes that the evidence from bilingual children poses challenges for both accounts of SLI.

Non-native speech is difficult for native listeners to understand. While listeners can learn to understand non-native speech after exposure, it is unclear how to optimize this learning. Experimental subjects transcribed non-native speech and were paid either a flat rate or based on their performance. Participants who were paid based on performance demonstrated improved performance overall and faster learning than participants who were paid a flat rate. These results suggest that exposure alone is not sufficient to optimize learning of non-native speech and that current models of this process must be revised to account for the effects of motivation and incentive.

This study investigates the shared, independent, and interactive effects of metalinguistic skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge) to word reading with a sample of struggling adult readers. Controlling for vocabulary knowledge, a second-order latent factor of metalinguistic awareness accounted for unique variance (62.5%) in adults’ word reading skills. Two-way latent interactions between the metalinguistic skills (phonological awareness × morphological awareness, morphological awareness × orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness × orthographic knowledge) revealed unique interactive contributions (1%–5.2%) of these skills to word reading controlling for the metalinguistic skill main effects and vocabulary knowledge. In particular, high levels of morphological awareness are critical to word reading irrespective of high or low phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge. In addition, higher phonological awareness skills are critical to word reading irrespective of high or low orthographic knowledge. These results indicate the importance as well as the complexity of the nature of metalinguistic skills underlying word reading for struggling adult readers. The theoretical, empirical, and applied implications of these findings are discussed in the context of researchers and practitioners invested in improving outcomes in adult literacy programs.

The relationship between the ways in which words are pronounced and spelled has been shown to affect spoken word processing, and a consistent relationship between pronunciation and spelling has been reported as a possible cause of unreduced pronunciations being easier to process than reduced counterparts although reduced pronunciations occur more frequently. In the present study, we investigate the effect of pronunciation-to-spelling consistency for reduced and unreduced pronunciations in L1 and L2 listeners of a logographic language. More precisely, we compare L1 and L2 Japanese listeners to probe whether they use orthographic information differently when processing reduced and unreduced speech. Using pupillometry, the current study provides evidence that extends the hypothesis about the role of orthography in the processing of reduced speech. Orthographic realization matters in processing for L1 and L2 advanced listeners. More specifically, how consistent the orthographic realization is with its phonological form (phonology-to-orthography consistency) modulates the extent to which reduced pronunciation induces additional processing costs. The results are further discussed in terms of their implications for how listeners process reduced speech and the role of the orthographic form in speech processing.

This study examines the acquisition of sex-neutral uses of masculine terms by English- and Spanish-speaking children. English and Spanish differ in that sex-neutral uses of masculine terms are much more common in the latter, and in that English is a natural-gender language, while Spanish is a grammatical-gender language. For these reasons, it was hypothesized that Spanish-speaking children might discover the neutral, unmarked interpretations of masculine terms earlier than their English-speaking counterparts, who might have difficulty in moving away from an early sex-based interpretation of such forms to their sex-neutral application. Data from 256 children failed to confirm the hypothesis. Subjects from both language groups appeared to pay little attention to gender marking outside the noun, and they both paid less attention to masculine gender markers than to feminine gender markers outside the noun.

Recent work has suggested that phrasing occurs in prelinguistic vocalizations, and that audition significantly influences prelinguistic vocal development. The present report is about the continuing study of a child who is referred to as congenitally acochlear because he was born with complete bilateral absence of cochleas. The only prior report on the vocal development of an acochlear child was provided in a previous article in this journal about the present subject (Lynch, Oiler, & Steffens, 1989). Because this child was not producing meaningful speech during the 27 to 42 months of age in which he was studied, investigation of him provided a unique opportunity to observe prelinguistic vocal development in the complete absence of auditory information. In the prior study of the acochlear child, the analytical focus was on developmental changes in relations between his syllable characteristics and those of mature speech. In the present study, the analytical focus was on a recently introduced approach to the study of prelinguistic vocalizations involving the description of syllable groupings within a prosodic hierarchy. Adult judges identified a hierarchy of syllables embedded within utterances and utterances embedded within prelinguistic phrases in the acochlear child's vocalizations. Similar to the prelinguistic phrases of typically developing infants and infants with Down syndrome previously reported on (Lynch, Oller, Steffens, & Buder, 1995), the present child's prelinguistic phrases were characterized by a systematic lengthening of phrase-final syllables and cohesive temporal patterning. In addition, the durations of the acochlear child's prelinguistic phrases were similar to those of typically developing infants. However, in contrast with those of typically developing infants and infants with Down syndrome, the durational features of the prelinguistic phrases of the acochlear child were relatively unstable across development. Overall, the results indicate that audition is not necessary for the formation of prelinguistic phrasing, but hearing does influence certain aspects of prelinguistic phrasing. Based on the data obtained on this subject, typically developing infants, and infants with Down syndrome, essential characteristics of well-formed prelinguistic phrases are proposed. These are termed “canonical” phrases; their production and development may be important in the acquisition of meaningful speech.

In this issue of Applied Psycholinguistics, we present a first annual Keynote Article. The article itself, in this case by Harald Clahsen and Claudia Felser, is followed by the Commentaries of several other researchers. The authors then reply to the Commentaries. It is our hope that this format will provide our readers with an in-depth discussion of central and topical issues in psycholinguistic research. We are grateful to Drs. Clahsen and Felser for writing the initial keynote article as well as to the group of researchers who provided their thoughtful and rigorous commentary.

Emergent bilinguals (EBs) who are exposed to societal language at school but use another language at home may experience difficulties in mastering the societal language, especially those at risk for language and reading disabilities. Learning phonologically specific new words that discriminate between phonemes may foster phonological awareness and word reading. This study examined the effectiveness of a lexical specificity intervention program that targeted phoneme discrimination in EBs at risk for reading disabilities. EBs who scored below the 25th percentile on the screening measures were selected and randomly assigned to one of two conditions: at-risk intervention or at-risk control. Of the 76 EBs in the at-risk group, 40 were randomly assigned to receive the intervention. A group of 51 typically developing EBs who did not meet the risk criteria were selected as typical controls. The pre- and post-tests include phoneme discrimination, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, fluency, and decoding. The at-risk intervention group showed improvement on the phoneme discrimination task after the intervention and outperformed the at-risk control group but not the typical control group. In addition, growth was observed during both the training and testing sessions of the intervention. The lexical specificity intervention could be a good resource to enhance a key precursor to literacy development for at-risk EBs.

Guadalupe Valdes and Richard Figueroa carefully and clearly craft an argument for why bilingualism and testing constitute a special case of bias that continues to have serious consequences for today's school-age minority population in the United States. This argument could not be more timely, given the drive in the United States for standards and a rising wave of state-mandated standardized testing programs for all students, including bilinguals. Perhaps a summary of this book should be on the desk of every educational leader and policymaker charged with the mandate of administering standardized tests to bilingual students and comparing their scores with those of monolingual groups for the purpose of special education and vocational placements.

In their target article, Clahsen and Felser (CF) review studies that they and others have conducted in recent years to confirm the dual mechanism hypothesis and to extend its application to first and second language (L1 and L2) learners. They interpret the findings as supporting both the dual mechanism hypothesis and the claim that the sentence-level processing of L2 but not L1 learners shows “striking” differences compared to adult native speakers. I argue that an exclusive focus on the representation of linguistic knowledge is insufficient for understanding the real-time processes in morphological production and sentence comprehension.

In this article, the authors lay out an impressive body of evidence that supports two main claims. First, they favor the continuity hypothesis, according to which children's parsing mechanisms are essentially the same as adults'. Parsing strategies change little over time, and those changes that occur are attributed to differences in lexical processing efficiency and working memory capacity. Second, they suggest that there are substantial differences in the parsing strategies adopted by native speakers and adult learners of second languages.

Clahsen and Felser's article (CF) is an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics in several respects. First, it draws attention to the importance of a better understanding of the processing mechanisms utilized by child and adult language learners. Differences in these mechanisms may be responsible for the final outcome of the acquisition process. Second, the article provides an excellent summary of current first language (L1) and second language (L2) research on processing. A variety of studies, ranging from morphological off-line investigations to on-line research on syntactic development, are reviewed in a concise and accurate manner; the cross-linguistic dimension of the article makes both the review and the argument even more comprehensive and convincing. Third, based on their own experimental results, and the results from other studies, the authors propose a novel account of L2 processing, the so-called shallow syntax hypothesis (SSH).