Elderly adults (70 to 89 years) and young adults (30 to 49 years) were asked to imitate complex sentences involving embedded gerunds, wh-clauses, that-clauses, and relative clauses. The young adults were able to imitate accurately or correctly paraphrase the sentences regardless of the length, position, or type of embedded clause. The elderly adults could accurately imitate or paraphrase short constructions. The elderly adults were unable to imitate or paraphrase correctly long constructions, especially those in which the embedded clause was sentence-initial. The pattern of results demonstrates an age-related decline in syntactic processing abilities due, perhaps, to the increased processing demands of the long or sentence-initial constructions.

Although a relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary has been widely observed, questions remain about the direction of that relationship. This longitudinal study explores the temporal relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary among monolingual English-speaking children. Participants were 100 children tested in Grades 2 and 3. We evaluated morphological awareness and vocabulary in both grades, along with phonological awareness, word reading, pseudoword reading, and nonverbal reasoning. Cross-lagged regression analyses with autoregressive controls assessed the temporal relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary; morphological awareness at Grade 2 predicted change in vocabulary between Grades 2 and 3, but vocabulary did not predict change in morphological awareness. The results add to our understanding of the relationship between these two developing skills.

The effectiveness of a high variability identification training procedure to improve native Japanese identification and production of the American English (AE) mid and low vowels /æ/, //, //, //, // was investigated. Vowel identification and production performance for two groups of Japanese participants was measured before and after a 6-week identification training period. Recordings were made of both group's pre-/posttraining vowel productions of the five vowels, which were evaluated by a group of native AE listeners using a five-alternative, forced-choice identification task and by an acoustic analysis of the vowel productions. The overall results confirmed that the identification performance of the experimental (trained) participants improved after identification training with feedback and that the training also had a positive effect on their production of the target AE vowels.

Groups of good and poor readers at second-grade level were tested for comprehension of adjectival constructions of the John is eager/easy to please types and of center-embedded relative clause constructions. The poor readers were inferior to good readers in understanding O-type adjectives (easy) but not S-type (eager). As well, they were poorer at comprehending embedded sentences, but only when the sentences described improbable events, ones which reversed the normal subject/object roles. When either noun could, on pragmatic grounds, assume either role, both groups fared equally well. The results are interpreted as casting doubt on recent assertions that deficient use of a phonetic memory code underlies the syntactic inferiority often seen in poor readers. A more pervasive linguistic immaturity is suggested as being involved.

This study examined whether measures used to identify children at risk for reading failure are appropriate for children from different language backgrounds. Tasks assessing literacy and phonological and language processing at the beginning and end of kindergarten were administered to 540 native English speakers (NS), 59 bilingual children (BL), and 60 children whose initial exposure to English was when they began school (ESL). Although the BL and ESL children performed more poorly than the NS children on most measures of phonological and linguistic processing, the acquisition of basic literacy skills for children with different language backgrounds developed in a similar manner. Furthermore, planned contrasts between the language groups did not explain the variance in the children's literacy performance in May. Instead, alphabetic knowledge and phonological processing were important contributors to early reading skill. Therefore, children learning English may acquire literacy skills in English in a similar manner to NS children, although their alphabetic knowledge may precede and facilitate the acquisition of phonological awareness in English.

In this study we compared two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in the foreign language classroom. Thirty-nine students in two sections of an introductory college French course served as subjects. Eight target structures, exemplifying “exceptions to a rule,” were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions for a section taught in the spring; each structure was assigned to the opposite teaching condition for a section taught the following fall. In one condition we simply taught the students the exception as an exception. In the other – what we called the Garden Path condition – we presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the rule; we then asked them to generate the form (which we knew to be an exception) and then corrected their resulting overgeneralization error. Analysis of subsequent formal testing showed that students learned the exception better in the Garden Path condition and that this advantage persisted throughout the semesterlong course. We hypothesized that this technique helped students to focus attention both on the rule and on the features of the particular structure that marked it as an exception.

The production of regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated among the members of an English-speaking family with a hereditary disorder of language. Unlike the control subjects, the family members affected by the disorder failed to generate overregularizations (e.g., digged) or novel regular forms (plammed, crived), whereas they did produce novel irregularizations (crive–crove). They showed word frequency effects for regular past tense forms (looked) and had trouble producing regulars and irregulars (looked, dug). This pattern cannot be easily explained by deficits of articulation or of perceptual processing, by previous simulations of impairments to a single-mechanism system, or by the extended optional infinitive hypothesis. We argue that the pattern is consistent with a three-level explanation. First, we posit a grammatical deficit of rules or morphological paradigms. This may be caused by a dysfunction of a frontal/basal-ganglia “procedural memory” system previously implicated in the implicit learning and use of motor and cognitive skills. Second, in contexts requiring inflection in the normal adult grammar, the affected subjects appear to retrieve word forms as a function of their accessibility and conceptual appropriateness (“conceptual selection”). Their acquisition and use of these word forms may rely on a “declarative memory” system previously implicated in the explicit learning and use of facts and events. Third, a compensatory strategy may be at work. Some family members may have explicitly learned a strategy of adding suffix-like endings to forms retrieved by conceptual selection. The morphological errors of young normal children appear to be similar to those of the affected family members, who may have been left stranded with conceptual selection by a specific developmental arrest. The same underlying deficit may also explain the impaired subjects' difficulties with derivational morphology.

Canadian children (n = 81; 9–13 years) who spoke both English and Italian were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. There was a significant relationship between English and Italian across all phonological tasks. The relationship was less evident for syntactic skills and was generally absent for working memory measures. Analyses of phonological, syntactic, and memory processes based on levels of skill in English reading showed significantly better performance by skilled readers compared to less skilled readers; this was also true for the 11- to 13-year-olds compared to the 9- to 10-year-olds. Similar results were obtained as a function of levels of skill in Italian reading. On all Italian tasks, the bilingual children lagged behind monolingual children matched on age. However, less skilled and skilled bilingual Italian children had significantly higher scores than monolingual English–Canadian children (with comparable reading skills) on English tasks involving reading, spelling, syntactic awareness, and working memory. The results suggest that English–Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing, but it may influence other linguistic modules. In addition, exposure to a language with more predictable grapheme–phoneme correspondences, such as Italian, may enhance phonological skills in English.

Self-paced reading tests (SPRs) are being increasingly adopted by second language (L2) researchers. Using SPR with L2 populations presents specific challenges, and its use is still evolving in L2 research (as well as in first language research, in many respects). Although the topic of several narrative overviews (Keating & Jegerski, 2015; Roberts, 2016), we do not have a comprehensive picture of its usage in L2 research. Building on the growing body of systematic reviews of research practices in applied linguistics (e.g., Liu & Brown, 2015; Plonsky, 2013), we report a methodological synthesis of the rationales, study contexts, and methodological decision making in L2 SPR research. Our comprehensive search yielded 74 SPRs used in L2 research. Each instrument was coded along 121 parameters, including: reported rationales and study characteristics, indicating the scope and nature of L2 SPR research agendas; design and analysis features and reporting practices, determining instrument validity and reliability; and materials transparency, affecting reproducibility and systematicity of agendas. Our findings indicate an urgent need to standardize the use and reporting of this technique, requiring empirical investigation to inform methodological decision making. We also identify several areas (e.g., study design, sample demographics, instrument construction, data analysis, and transparency) where SPR research could be improved to enrich our understanding of L2 processing, reading, and learning.

Comprehension and strategy use by autistic children were tested in two experiments. Eighteen autistic subjects were compared with thirty normal 3- and 4-year-olds, matched on the PPVT and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. In Experiment I subjects were asked to act out active and passive, biased and reversible sentences. The autistic group's overall comprehension was lower than that of the normal controls; although the autistic subjects did use a word-order strategy, they did not generally use a probable-event strategy. These findings were confirmed in Experiment II, in which the same procedure with anomalous three-word items was used. The results are interpreted as evidence that in autism there is a semantic-cognitive deficit in utilizing conceptual knowledge about relational aspects of the environment and that this deficit underlies the comprehension difficulties of autistic persons.

Children produce a deictic gesture for a particular object (point at dog) approximately 3 months before they produce the verbal label for that object (“dog”; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gesture thus paves the way for children's early nouns. We ask here whether the same pattern of gesture preceding and predicting speech holds for iconic gestures. In other words, do gestures that depict actions precede and predict early verbs? We observed spontaneous speech and gestures produced by 40 children (22 girls, 18 boys) from age 14 to 34 months. Children produced their first iconic gestures 6 months later than they produced their first verbs. Thus, unlike the onset of deictic gestures, the onset of iconic gestures conveying action meanings followed, rather than preceded, children's first verbs. However, iconic gestures increased in frequency at the same time as verbs did and, at that time, began to convey meanings not yet expressed in speech. Our findings suggest that children can use gesture to expand their repertoire of action meanings, but only after they have begun to acquire the verb system underlying their language.

Do differences among first languages (LI) affect word recognition in reading a second language (L2)? Participants in this study had either Indonesian (an alphabetic language) or Chinese (a logographic language) as an L1 and were learning English (an alphabetic language) as an L2. Under the connectionist rubric, it was predicted that an alphabetic LI would facilitate word recognition in an alphabetic L2, especially if the LI and L2 have similar spelling patterns. Facilitation is relative to a logographic LI. The model also predicted a better recognition for high-frequency words in the L2 relative to low-frequency words. The results of a lexical decision task largely confirmed these hypotheses.

The growth and predictive relations of early vocabulary and inflectional morphology were examined in children with (N=107) and without (N=93) familial risk for dyslexia. Children's receptive and expressive vocabulary and inflectional morphological skills were assessed longitudinally at 2, 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years by using a parent report tool (the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory), measures from a spontaneous speech sample, and standardized tests. Children with and without familial risk for dyslexia did not differ from each other, either in expressive vocabulary or in composite scores of inflectional morphology at the age of 2 years. However, language skills indicated increasing group differences with age. Inflectional morphology showed differing predictive patterns for the at-risk group and their controls. Proficiency of inflections at 2 years significantly predicted 5-year-olds' language skills in the at-risk group. In contrast, for their age-matched controls inflections were not a significant predictor until the age of 3.5 years. Our findings suggest that children from families with dyslexia risk status and low inflectional skills at an early age are at higher risk for impairments in subsequent language development than are their age-matched controls.

Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature of monolingual comparative normativity has historically contributed to inequalities in many facets of bilingualism research and continues to impede progress on multiple levels. Beyond framing our views on the matter, we offer some epistemological considerations and methodological alternatives to this standard practice that improve empirical rigor while fostering increased diversity, inclusivity, and equity in our field.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have distinctive impairments in the comprehension of sentences that involve long-distance syntactic relationships. This has been interpreted as evidence for impairment in an innate grammatical module. An alternative theory attributes such difficulties to lower level problems with speech perception or deficits in phonological working memory. These theoretical accounts were contrasted using comprehension data from three subgroups: 20 children with SLI, 19 children with mild–moderate hearing loss, and normally developing children matched on age and/or language level. There were close similarities between the hearing-impaired and SLI groups on a measure of phoneme perception. Children with SLI did poorly on tests assessing knowledge of Binding principles and in assigning thematic roles in passive sentences whereas hearing-impaired children performed close to control levels, indicating that poor speech perception cannot account for this pattern of deficit. However, the pattern of errors on syntactic tasks and the relatively weak correlation between different indicators of syntactic deficit seemed incompatible with a modular hypothesis. We propose that limited processing capacity is the principal determinant of deficient syntactic comprehension in SLI.

This study explored the conceptual status of metalinguistic ability by determining whether or not metalinguistic ability can account for variation in early reading achievement independently of more general language abilities. First-grade children were given a test battery assessing phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, syntactic proficiency, word decoding ability, and reading comprehension ability. Strong zero-order correlations were observed among all experimental measures. However, multiple regression analyses revealed that metalinguistic ability did not contribute to the prediction of early reading achievement when general language ability effects were statistically controlled.

This study explores the relationship between aptitude, phonological memory (PM), and second language (L2) proficiency in nonnovice adult learners of English as an L2. Native speakers of French (N = 77) enrolled in a university Teaching English as a Second Language program were the participants in the study. Exploratory factor analysis revealed three main factors corresponding to the variables examined: L2 proficiency, aptitude, and PM. Multiple regression analyses revealed aptitude subtests and PM together predicted 29% of the variance in L2 proficiency. Additional regression analyses carried out on lower and higher proficiency subgroups, created by a median split on proficiency scores, revealed that none of the variables predicted L2 proficiency in the higher proficiency subgroup. PM remained as a significant predictor for the lower proficiency subgroup, extending the pattern of results found elsewhere in younger populations to adult nonnovice L2 learners.

A longitudinal study compared the effects of distributed and massed practice schedules on the learning of second language English syntax. Participants were taught distinctions in the tense and aspect systems of English at short and long practice intervals. They were then tested at short and long intervals. The results showed that distributed practice led to superior test scores on the long-term tests, indicating that the learning of second language syntax can benefit from distributed practice in a manner very similar to that reported for other skills and information types in the experimental psychology literature. Implications for intensive language-leaning programs and syllabus design in general are discussed.

The relation between speech perception and reading ability was investigated. Identification and discrimination tests with stimuli on a stop consonant place of articulation continuum (/PA/-/IA/) were presented to various groups of good and poor readers (normal first graders on a reading continuum in Study 1, moderately and severely dyslexic and high- and low-achieving normal children in Study 2). In both studies, reading-related perception differences were especially marked in a comparison of actual and predicted (from identification test) discrimination scores, suggesting that the poor readers have special difficulty with a discrimination-specific task demand. In Study 3, reading-group differences still show up if the stimulus pairs of the discrimination test are simply to be repeated (eliminating the similarity judgment factors), and are also very pronounced on a nonspeech discrimination test (with 130 ms pure tones of slightly different frequencies). In Studies 1 and 3 identification slope and phoneme boundary differences between reader groups were found as well. Though these results do not definitely prove the auditory perception hypothesis, they support it. The conditions that should be satisfied by auditory perception tasks in future reading acquisition research are briefly discussed.

The study of bilingualism has a history that extends from deciphering ancient multilingual texts to mapping the structure of the multilingual brain. The language experiences of individual bilinguals are equally diverse and characterized by unique contexts of acquisition and use that can shape not only sociocultural identity but also cognitive and neural function. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this variability in scholarly perspectives and language experiences has given rise to a range of methods for defining bilingualism. The goal of this article is to initiate a conversation about the utility of a more unified approach to how we think about, study, and measure bilingualism. Using concrete case studies, we illustrate the value of enhancing communication and streamlining terminology across researchers with different methodologies within questions, different questions within domains, and different domains within scientific inquiry. We specifically consider the utility and feasibility of a bilingualism quotient (BQ) construct, discuss the idea of a BQ relative to the well-established intelligence quotient, and include recommendations for next steps. We conclude that though the variability in language backgrounds and approaches to defining bilingualism presents significant challenges, concerted efforts to systematize and synthesize research across the field may enable the construction of a valid and generalizable index of multilingual experience.