This paper examines individual differences in the rate of early lexical development with a specific interest in gender differences. Twenty-six children were assessed monthly from either 8, 9, or 10 months of age through 14 months of age, using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures. Individual differences in developmental trajectories of vocabulary comprehension and production were explored using two analytic approaches. The first involved traditional parametric statistics, while the latter utilized classification procedures. Both techniques demonstrated that the lexical development of girls outpaced that of boys. The inductive approach also revealed the presence of distinctive “fast” and “slow” trajectories for both comprehension and production that were not exclusively segregated by gender. Cases exhibiting fast trajectories were predominantly girls, but several boys also followed this developmental pattern. The opposite pattern emerged for the slow trajectories. There was strong correspondence between production and comprehension, but a few cases clustered into the fast development group on one measure and the slow group on the other. The identification of these outliers may offer an important tool for exploring mechanisms of language development. Validation of the clustering results was based on the prospective prediction of an external criterion variable, namely, lexical development at 21 months, and by replication on an independent sample.

This study compared the oral narrative skills of 31 school-aged children diagnosed at 24 to 31 months with expressive language delay (late talkers) with those of 23 typically developing peers. Based upon an extensively studied picture-book task, Frog, Where are You?, narratives were elicited from all participants both at age 8 and age 9. At age 9, children were asked to tell the story again and to increase their references to evaluative information (characters' emotions, character speech, and causal explanations of events; “supported” telling condition). Groups were compared on Syntax, Story Grammar, Cohesion, and Evaluative Information factor scores derived from the narrative measures. Children with histories of early language delay obtained lower Syntax, Story Grammar, and Evaluative Information factor scores than typically developing peers for each of their three narrative productions. The late talkers scored in the average range at age 8 on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Revised (CELF-R), but their scores were significantly lower than those of the comparison peers. When the group differences on the Story Grammar factor were reanalyzed with the CELF-R score as a covariate, the late talkers demonstrated weaknesses in story grammar skills independent of the variance accounted for by their weaker general language skills. This suggests that the use of narrative structure may be a specific area of underachievement for late talkers, in addition to their continuing weakness in syntactic and lexical abilities, relative to typically developing peers from the same SES background.

The use of complex syntax was investigated in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome (n = 24) and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Both groups used conjoined and subordinate sentence forms and did not differ significantly in either the proportion of utterances containing complex sentences or in the variety of complex sentence types used. The analysis of developmental patterns suggested a similar order of acquisition across groups. The findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple syntax. This study does not support earlier findings of a critical period effect in syntactic development in Down syndrome based on age or syntactic complexity.

This study investigated the relationships of expressive vocabulary size with frequency of being read to and frequency of watching television among 64 bilingual 21- to 27-month-old children from homes in which Spanish and English were spoken. The frequency of being read to in each language was related positively with expressive vocabulary size in the same language, and the relationships were significant even when taking the children's age and overall exposure to each language into account. The frequency of watching television was not related significantly to vocabulary size in either language.

This article presents an analysis of 500 submorphemic slips of the typewriter key that escaped the notice of authors and other proofreaders and thereby made their way into the published records of scientific research. Despite this high selectivity, the corpus is not found to differ in major ways from other collections of keying slips. The main characteristics of this error type include a predominance of within-word slips, an elevated rate of noncontextual slips, a heightened incidence of omissions (in particular, masking errors), a high number of adjacent switches, and an uncommonness of these slips in word edges. In all these respects, slips of the key resemble slips of the pen, although not slips of the tongue. It is argued that speech errors are shaped by a fully deployed structural representation, whereas key slips arise under the influence of a weak structural representation. By implication, speaking is characterized by a hierarchical strategy of activation while typewriting is subject to the so-called staircase strategy of serialization in which activation is a function of linear distance. These disparate strategies may be understood as a response of the processing system to disparate requirements, such as varying speed of execution.

This study examined the use of clitic pronouns by incipient bilingual Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-old children with and without language impairments. Incipient bilingualism refers to the initial stages of contact between two languages, when an individual still has only passive knowledge of a second language. The participants included 10 children with typical language development and 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI). The experimental task elicited clitic pronouns serving as direct objects with finite verbs (lo, la, los, and las). The children who had SLI used clitic pronouns less frequently than their age-matched peers and were less accurate in their use of gender agreement for clitics. No group differences were found for third person singular and plural verb inflections in the preterite tense. These results were compared to previous studies of Spanish- and Italian-speaking children with SLI.

This paper attempts to provide a reliable description of the characteristics of intrasentential language mixing produced by a group a Korean–English bilingual children, with a special focus on the distinction between code switching and borrowing. Making use of the inherent variability in case marking in Korean, this study employs a quantitative variationist method to determine the status of single nouns of English origin in an otherwise Korean discourse, which constitute the largest portion of the bilingual data. Analysis of the overall bilingual data suggests that intrasentential language mixing is determined by the bilingual abilities and preferences of the speaker as well as those of the addressee. The results of the variable analysis of case marking show that most of the English-origin objects and subjects of Korean verbs are best treated as borrowings and not as code switches.

Two experiments examined the effect of single-modality (sound or text) and bimodal (sound and text) presentation on word learning, as measured by both improvements in spoken word recognition efficiency (long lag repetition priming) and recognition memory. Native and advanced nonnative speakers of English were tested. In Experiment 1 auditory lexical decisions on familiar words were equally primed by prior bimodal and sound-only presentation, whereas there were no priming effects for nonwords. Experiment 2 employed a rhyme judgment task using nonwords. Repetition priming of auditory rhyme judgment decisions was now obtained, and this was greater in the bimodal than the sound-only condition. In both experiments prior bimodal presentation improved recognition memory for spoken words and nonwords compared to single modality presentation. We conclude that simultaneous text presentation can aid novel word learning under certain conditions, as assessed by both explicit and implicit memory tests.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations between communicative competence and five dimensions of personality in 241 first and second language–learning children in The Netherlands. To determine the underlying communicative competence of the first and second language learners of Dutch, a broad array of linguistic measures and teacher judgments were collected. Observational scales referring to the Big Five personality factors were used to characterize the children's personalities. The results showed that three basic components underlie both the monolingual and bilingual children's communicative competence: organizational competence, involving lexical, syntactic, discourse, and functional abilities; pragmatic competence, involving sociocultural routines and illocutionary force; and strategic competence, involving the planning and monitoring of communicative behavior. The relations between the different dimensions of personality and the components of communicative competence revealed the following patterns to characterize first language learners: conscientiousness and emotional stability correlated with basic organizational skills; openness to experience correlated with pragmatic competence; and a broad range of personality characteristics with the acquisition of communicative strategies. In contrast, primarily openness to experience and, to a lesser extent, conscientiousness and extraversion were found to be related to the buildup of basic organizational skills, the acquisition of pragmatic skills, and the development of monitoring strategies in second language learners.

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of the rhyming portion of the Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS) program, a comprehensive and explicit phonological awareness intervention curriculum that was designed specifically for preschool children with speech and language impairments. A single-subject research design was used to examine treatment effects among children with varying levels of communicative competence, to permit flexibility while piloting the intervention program, and to provide experimental control. The PASS rhyming module was implemented with eight children with speech and/or language impairments, following the establishment of a stable pretreatment baseline on a series of phonological awareness probes. After instruction, all of the children demonstrated substantial improvement in their rhyming ability, which generally appeared to be attributable to the intervention rather than environmental or maturational factors. These findings suggest that PASS rhyming training was an effective approach to phonological awareness instruction for the preschoolers with disabilities who comprised our sample. Thus, it appears that explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is beneficial for children at a point earlier than is typically judged to be therapeutically appropriate.

In this study, two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments were used to examine people's production and awareness of sound–spelling relationships. The results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest that, in general, people use phoneme–grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Alternatively, the results of the orthographic awareness experiments suggest that, under some circumstances, people can use larger sized sound–spelling relationships when judging how frequently subsyllabic relationships occur. Together the results suggest that there is a dissociation between sound–spelling production and sound–spelling awareness tasks, and the size of the sound–spelling relationships that people use varies under different tasks and task conditions.

The study of African American English (AAE) has been historically focused on the dialectal variations of adolescent and adult speakers. More recent investigations of dialect used by very young AAE speakers were undertaken with the goal of describing the language produced by early elementary and preschool-aged children. One important outcome of these studies is increased attention to the importance of considering the impact of developmental influences in our characterizations of dialect use. In this study we explore the differences between primary caregivers and their young children in dialect use across generations by directly examining the dialectal variations apparent during play interactions between primary caregivers and their young children. We conclude that there is indeed evidence in these interactions of differences between the child and caregiver in the structure and use of individual AAE features. Another conclusion is that there are many similarities in the distribution of AAE between these older and younger interactants, highlighting not only their kinship ties but also their membership in the same linguistic community.

Lexical stress patterns appear to be important in word recognition processes in normal individuals. The present investigation employed a lexical decision task to assess whether left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients are similarly sensitive to stress patterns in lexical access. The results confirmed that individuals without brain damage are influenced by stress patterns, as indicated by increased lexical decision latencies to incorrectly stressed word and nonword stimuli. The data for the LHD patients revealed an effect of stress for real word targets only, whereas the reaction time data for the RHD patients as a group showed no significant influence of stress pattern. However, there was a great deal of individual variability in performance. The latency and error rate findings suggest that LHD patients and non-brain-damaged individuals are both sensitive to lexical stress in word recognition, but the LHD patients are more likely to treat incorrectly stressed items as nonwords. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic processing and the role of lexical stress in word recognition.

This study used two methods to assess bilingual dominance in four groups of 18 Italian–English bilinguals, who were selected on the basis of age of arrival (AOA) in Canada (early: 2–13 years; late: 15–26 years) and percentage use of the first language (L1), Italian (low L1 use: 1–15%; high L1 use: 25–85%). Ratios were derived from the bilinguals' self-ratings of ability to speak and understand Italian compared to English (the “verbal” self-rating ratios) and to read and write Italian compared to English (the “written” self-rating ratios). The ratio of the mean duration of English and Italian sentences produced by each bilingual was also computed. AOA and L1 use had the same effect on the self-rating and sentence duration ratios, which were correlated. The bilinguals who arrived in Canada as young adults and continued to use Italian often were the most likely to be Italian dominant. Dominance in Italian was associated with a relatively high level of performance in Italian (assessed in a translation task) and relatively poor performance in English (assessed by measuring strength of foreign accents). Both groups of late bilinguals (late low, late high) and both groups of early bilinguals (early low, early high) were found to produce English sentences with detectable accents. However, a group of 18 bilinguals (all early bilinguals) selected from the original sample of 72 based on their dominance in English did not have detectable foreign accents. This suggested that interlingual interference effects may not be inevitable.

This study examines individual differences in the ability to integrate information from word parts and context in interpreting novel kanji compounds (i.e., words consisting of two or more Chinese characters). To account for different approaches that students take to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words, the study also investigates the relationship between students' beliefs about the effectiveness of using kanji and/or contextual clues and their abilities to use the clue(s). A total of 74 English-speaking college students learning Japanese inferred the meanings of unknown compounds consisting of familiar characters under three conditions (words in isolation, contextual clues only, and both). The effects of the two sources appeared additive when examined across all participants. Further analysis, however, indicated that nearly half the students did not combine the two sources and overrelied on either kanji or contextual clues. The inability to integrate information and overreliance on kanji clues modestly but statistically significantly correlated with belief in the efficacy of an integration strategy. The combined effect of multiple sources of information, therefore, must be interpreted in terms of individual differences.

This study investigated the potential influences of general processing capacity and sustained selective attention on the temporal processing of a group of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a group of age-matched (CA) controls. Children completed a sustained selective auditory attention task and two speech processing tasks, the Speech Identification Task, representing a cognitively more complex task, and a standard speech discrimination task, representing a cognitively less complex task. The speech stimuli included two-formant, 40-ms transition [ba] and [da] consonant–vowel (CV) syllables and the nonstop CV syllable [sa]. We hypothesized, in accordance with Tallal's temporal processing deficit view, that if SLI children have a fundamental deficit in temporal processing, they should demonstrate poor performance on both speech processing tasks relative to CA children. By contrast, if the temporal processing problem of SLI children relates to a limitation in general processing capacity, the SLI children should show better performance on the discrimination task compared to the identification task. Alternatively, if poor sustained selective attention mediates SLI children's poor temporal processing, the SLI children should show poor performance on an independent measure of auditory attention, which in turn should account for a portion of the variance in any observed group differences in temporal processing. Results showed no group difference in sustained selective auditory attention. On the identification task, group, stimulus-type, and interaction effects emerged. SLI children performed more poorly than CA children, and stop CV syllables were identified less frequently than the nonstop CV syllable. On the discrimination task, there were no main effects or interactions for accuracy (Á score). For the reaction time analysis, only a stimulus-type effect was found, with children responding faster to the /sa/ syllable. Results were interpreted to suggest that these SLI children did not evidence a basic temporal processing deficit. Rather, the SLI children's poor identification task performance was interpreted to reflect an interaction between these children's more limited general processing capacity and the nature of the task.

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.

This study examined the variables related to US immigrants' long-term attainment in English, their second language (L2), and their native language (L1). For 44 Mandarin–English bilinguals, with increasing age of arrival (AOA) in the United States, their accuracy in L2 grammaticality judgment tasks decreased and accuracy in an L1 grammaticality judgment task increased. Moreover, both AOA in the United States and mothers' English proficiency uniquely predicted a significant proportion of the variance for bilinguals' L2 proficiency. Finally, as a group, 72 speakers of three Asian languages showed lower levels of L2 proficiency and stronger AOA effects on the task performance than 32 speakers of six European languages. These differences in language proficiency were associated with differences in language use, language learning motivation, and cultural identification between the two groups. These findings suggest that L2 acquisition in the immigration setting is a complicated process involving the dynamic interactions of multiple variables.

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.

Phonological awareness skills are prerequisite to early reading, yet the development of phonological awareness is an understudied phenomenon. To identify factors that contribute to the development of phonological awareness, we investigated the longitudinal relationships among child background factors, structural oral language, and phonological awareness in a sample of 52 children from kindergarten to second grade and a subsample of this group who were nonreaders in kindergarten. Background measures were IQ, family literacy, socioeconomic status, and child's primary language; oral language measures were receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology; phonological awareness was measured by segmentation and blending. Principal component analysis of the structural language measures yielded a general oral language factor score. Regression analyses indicated that the background variables were unique predictors of kindergarten general oral language skill but did not predict phonological awareness skills. General oral language accounted for significant and substantial unique variance in phonological awareness each year for both the full sample and the subsample of nonreaders, controlling for reading ability. These findings suggest general oral language may contribute to the development of early reading through its significant influence on the development of phonological awareness.