Two experimental studies investigate the extent of 3- and 4-year-olds' relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information as they discriminate between presentations of Requests from Offers, and Requests from Questions presented in contexts. Contexts are manipulated systematically, and quantity of linguistic information in the presentations is progressively reduced. While younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, the older subjects' performance was relatively adversely affected. We consider a developmental shift in speech act comprehension strategy from an early more context-based approach to a later, more heavily text-dependent approach, perhaps linked to continuing development of linguistic awareness.

Previous research provides evidence about a relationship between the quality of questions and the depth of processing of an input. If questions about a subject matter are asked in a certain way, students are likely to process it in depth. In this article, inputs, question levels, and depths of processing are described. Three categories of coding were defined through observation of secondary classrooms in Zaire: (a) reproducing words (rote), (b) reproducing content (comprehension 1), (c) generating new content (comprehension 2). After teacher training emphasizing student comprehension, statistically significant shifts from Category 1 behavior to Category 2 and 3 behavior were observed in the experimental classes. It is suggested that surface or deep processing can be induced by manipulating certain dimensions of inputs and questions.

Recent studies have shown that children as well as adults can detect mispronounced words presented in running speech contexts. Listeners' detections are influenced by both phonological and lexical characteristics of the mispronounced words. The present study compared the performance of normal-speaking children, misarticulating children, and adults on a task which required the detection of mispronounced words. Phonological shifts presented in the stimuli represented both developmental and nondevelopmental patterns. Analysis of errors in detecting these mispronunciations indicated that adults were significantly more accurate than either group of children. In contrast, the performance of the two groups of children was relatively similar. Both children and adults more readily detected mispronunciations patterned after developmental errors than those mispronunciations manifesting more unusual, nondevelopmental sound shifts. Individual mispronounced words varied widely in their detectability. Nevertheless, those words which children found most difficult were also those on which adults most often erred. Parallels observed between the performance of the misarticulating children and their normally developing peers indicate that both younger groups use linguistic knowledge in a similar way in the perception of others' fluent speech.

This special issue brings together a set of four papers devoted to the experimental study of sentence processing by bilinguals in their second language. The basic finding reported in this research is that, in many cases, learners transfer their LI sentence processing strategies onto sentence processing in L2. Moreover, the influence of this transfer can be detected in weakened form even in fluent bilinguals who have spoken L2 for many years. In effect, these studies report on a kind of comprehension analog to “foreign accent” that first came to light during work on sentence comprehension within the framework of the Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1982).

Illiterate, unschooled adults were tested on their notions of word length. Experiment 1 showed that only about half of them performed very poorly on a task requiring the production of a long/short word. They were clearly inferior to formerly illiterate, unschooled adults. The illiterate group also broke up neatly into two subgroups, one performing perfectly or very well, the other failing completely or almost completely, when required to match the written and the oral form of long/short words. Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that about half of the illiterates were unable to choose the longest of two names when presented with drawings of objects. The results suggest that learning to read, though not strictly necessary, plays a decisive role in the development of the ability of many individuals to focus on phonological length.

The present study investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics from the perspective of functional constraints on sentence processing. The functionalist model of Bates and Mac-Whinney (1981a, 1987) is taken as a basis for investigating subjects' reactions to sentences in which word order, topic, and animacy are varied. Subjects were native speakers of Italian, a language which is sensitive to semantics for interpretation and English, a language which is sensitive to syntax for interpretation (Bates, McNew, MacWhinney, Devescovi, & Smith, 1982). The two native speaker groups were further subdivided in terms of second versus foreign language learners. This study focusses on the question of how learners move from one organizational system to another. It is argued that the ways in which L2 learners are able to determine the strength of dominant factors provides insights not only into the processes involved in L2 acquisition but also into the relative strength of components crosslinguistically and the strength of boundaries between linguistic and extra-linguistic information. The results suggest that in moving from a semantic-dominant language to a syntactic-dominant one, learners first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that language. On the other hand, moving in the other direction (from syntactic to semantic dominance) seems to come about with greater ease. To account for these results, a prototype model of acquisition is introduced. Finally, differences between second language and foreign language-learning environments are discussed.

The present study investigated the use of five speech markers in the native and second language production of French-English bilinguals in a military setting. We propose that these speech markers, mechanisms for self-repair and turn-taking in conversations, are a major component of fluency. The ten participants, five high fluency speakers and five low fluency speakers, were tape-recorded with their peers in three different situations in their native and second languages, and the frequency of occurrence of speech markers was tabulated for a 5-minute segment for each situation.

It was hypothesized that speakers who used differentially more prepositioned repairs (progressives) or markers placed before the repair that do not require a reorganization of the expectation of what is to follow based on what has been produced in the turn so far, would be judged more favourably than those who used more postpositioned repairs (regressives). There was no quantitative difference in the frequency of occurrence of speech markers between the high and low fluency speakers, but the high fluency speakers used more progressive than regressive types of marker. Progressive markers place fewer demands on the interlocutor than regressive markers, which require constant readjustments on the part of the listener. The profiles were similar for each individual in the native and second language but in every case there were fewer markers in the native than in the second language. Furthermore, there were fewer markers in the planned (teaching) than in the unplanned (interview) situation. The findings have important implications for the evaluation of second language fluency.

Samples of the communicative behavior of a group of higher-level mentally retarded adults engaged in conversation with peers were examined for indications of mature linguistic competence, specifically, grammatical morpheme and complex sentence use. The findings confirmed the expectation that the eventual level of mastery of these aspects of linguistic competence in higher-level retarded individuals is relatively high. Evidence for a normal developmental progression in the mastery of the grammatical morphemes was also forthcoming. In an analysis of individual complex sentence structures, no relationship was found between relative frequency of use of different types of complex sentences and presumed order of acquisition. However, subjects' ability to combine complex sentences did appear to be related to the presumed order of acquisition, although other factors may have also contributed to this relationship. Unexpectedly, a significant negative correlation was observed between relative frequency of complex sentence use and an estimate of conversational communicative competence. A possible reason for this finding was discussed.

The relationship between sign language rehearsal and written free recall was examined by having deaf college students overtly rehearse the sign language equivalents of printed English words. In studies of both immediate and delayed memory, word recall was found to increase as a function of total rehearsal frequency and frequency of appearance in rehearsal sets. The serial recall curves in both memory experiments evidenced a primacy effect, which was interpreted as resulting from increased rehearsal of the words in the initial positions over the course of the list. In contrast to findings from previous short- and long-term memory studies with normally hearing subjects, neither a recency nor a negative recency effect was found. High imagery words were rehearsed and recalled slightly more frequently in immediate memory, but there was no effect resulting from the different imagery values of the stimuli in delayed recall. These results are discussed in relation to current conceptualizations of memory and of linguistic processing by deaf individuals.

Specifically-language-impaired children and younger normal children matched for expressive language were presented with unfamiliar object names and referents across five experimental sessions. The objects differed in the degree to which they were associated with actions, and only certain of the object exemplars were named during presentation. Comprehension testing revealed that the specifically-language-impaired children acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children. However, their extension of the names to new exemplars was more restricted and less differentiated. Several possible accounts of these findings are evaluated.

A program of partial (half-day) French immersion in the Cincinnati Public Schools was evaluated in the kindergarten year. The English and French language development of participating native English-speaking children from both working and middle class backgrounds was assessed. The results indicated, firstly, that the pupils who spent half of their academic time in a foreign language (French) progressed just as well in English as carefully matched control pupils who followed a conventional all-English program. Secondly, it was found that socioeconomically underprivileged children (both black and white) benefited from an immersion-type introduction to a foreign language as much as pupils from middle class homes did. The degree of progress made in French was not linked with the social class background of the pupils even though this background factor clearly affected the students' performance on the English language tests. These results suggest that the immersion experience may help to diminish the effects of social class background.

A sentence interpretation experiment based on the functionalist Competition Model of speech processing (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982) was administered to three groups of university-age English L1, Japanese ESL, and Japanese L1 subjects (n = 12 per group) in an attempt to elicit evidence for (1) processing strategies characteristic of the Japanese and English L1 groups and, (2) transfer/influence of Japanese L1 strategies on the English sentence interpretations of the Japanese ESL group. Subjects selected the subject/actor of simple sentences incorporating word order, animacy, and stress cues in random converging and competing orders. The English L1 and ESL groups were tested on English sentences and the Japanese L1 group tested on Japanese sentences. The Japanese L1 interpretations were most heavily influenced by animacy cues, while the English L1 group showed a higher overall sensitivity to word order manipulations. The ESL group resembled the Japanese L1 group in reliance on animacy cues, with the exception of allowing inanimate nouns to act as subjects. While the ESL group showed greater sensitivity to word order effects than the Japanese L1 group, no “second-noun” strategy (i.e., systematically interpreting the NNV and VNN orders as left- and right-dislocated SOV and VOS orders) was evident.

Although the findings were generally consistent with previous research, the presence of contrasting response patterns in the English L1 group suggests caution in attempting to typify languages on the basis of processing strategies drawn from probablistic tendencies evident in grouped data, and leaves open the role of such processing strategy typologies as a potential source of variation in inter-language.

This study describes development in the realization of story structure in the written productions of schoolchildren at three grade levels (5, 8, and 12) when writing in two different modes: true stories and invented. The scripts analysed were randomly selected from the compositions produced by the entire population of the three grade levels in one Canadian Board (7,500 students). The instrument of analysis was based on the story grammar developed by Stein and Glenn (1979). The analysis revealed: (a) there is development by age in the degree of realization of an “ideal form” of story schema, that is, one involving some setting information plus one complete episode; (b) the rate of development differs depending on whether stories are true or invented; (c) patterns of such development are complex and cannot be represented by a steady curve upward.

Speakers of English and Dutch vary in how strongly they use various syntactic (e.g., word order, prepositions, case inflection) and semantic (e.g., noun animacy) cues to interpret native language sentences. For example, in simple NVN sentences, English speakers rely heavily on word order, while Dutch speakers rely on case inflection. This paper compares the cue usage of English/Dutch and Dutch/English bilinguals with varying amounts of second language exposure to that of native speaker control groups. For all constructions tested, dative constructions, simple NVN sentences, and relative clauses, it was found that with increasing exposure, cue usage in the second language gradually shifts from that appropriate to the first language to that appropriate to the second. A model of cue learning originally proposed to account for monolingual data is found to be compatible with the learning pattern exhibited by bilinguals.

This study asked whether lexical availability affects the length, complexity, order of mention, and fluency of children's utterances. Lexical availability was manipulated through discourse support (present or absent) and word frequency (high or low) for 40 target nouns. Length was indexed by mean number of words per communication unit. Complexity was indexed by mean number of verbs per communication unit. Earlier mention was measured by mean number of words preceding the target word in each communication unit. Thirty-six subjects, aged 4, 6, and 8, described 40 illustrations containing a high or low frequency target noun referent. In the discourse support condition, provided for one half of the target words, subjects named the target word prior to the description task. Results showed that the number of responses containing the target word varied with age, word frequency and discourse support condition; length of responses varied with age and its interaction with discourse support; earlier mention varied with age and discourse support condition; and fluency varied with discourse support condition. The results are discussed from the viewpoint of Bock's process model of sentence production.

An experiment is reported in which university undergraduates were given word definitions and asked to say aloud all responses that came to mind in the course of their attempts to retrieve the target words. Results showed that phonologically similar responses and word-fragments are good predictors of target word knowledge and the likelihood of eventual success in retrieval. Responses which were semantically related to the target word were less predictive of eventual success. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for interpreting tip-of-the-tongue analyses as a “window” on the process of word retrieval.

This study contrasted the interactions of less talkative children and their teacher with those of their peers during classroom “Sharing Time.” Seven reticent children and seven normal peers were observed and audiotape-recorded during 15 sessions across the school year. In addition to speaking less, reticent children engaged in less complex speech than their peers: They spoke more often about objects in the “here and now,” spoke about one topic at a turn, and spoke in shorter utterances. Questions were more frequently directed to the reticent children, but while peers responded to these questions as invitations to contribute further to the topic, reticent children frequently failed to respond to them in like manner. It is suggested that both anxiety and subtle language delays may contribute to the poorer discourse skills reticent children display.

This study is concerned with the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in bilingual speakers of Dutch and English. We used a sentence interpretation task designed to set up various “coalitions” and “competitions” among a restricted set of grammatical entities (i.e., word order, animacy, agreement). Performance in English paralleled that in Dutch in large measure, but where it diverged it approached performance on similar tasks by English monolinguals (Bates et al., 1982). These findings are interpreted on the basis of the “competition model,” a probabilistic theory of grammatical processing which provides a formalism for explaining what it means for a second language user to be “between” languages.

The percentage of unclear cohesive ties in the conversation of schizophrenic speakers is significantly higher than in a group of psychiatric patients with mixed diagnoses, mostly affective disorders. This measure of cohesive weakness is not related to the verbal IQ of the patients.

This finding was obtained in patients who were not prejudged to be thought disordered and was based on the analysis of all of their utterances during a ten minute interview. It is concluded that cohesive weakness is a more frequent characteristic of the language of schizophrenic speakers, compared to its incidence in the conversation of psychiatric patients in different diagnostic categories, with the possible exception of manic syndromes.

Twelve infants were observed longitudinally to examine the relationship of children's object play and social behavior and maternal object and social-centered talk to referential and expressive language. Measures of child behavior and maternal language were coded from play sessions videotaped in the home at 12, 15, and 18 months of age; mothers recorded their babies' first 50 words. Most children acquired a balanced distribution of object labels and social-centered words and phrases; a few children evidenced a more extreme “style.” More object labels were acquired by children who more often used a toy to engage mother and who had mothers who more often talked about toys. More social-centered speech was associated with children's nontoy-mediated social attention and more maternal behavior-focused speech.