There is limited research regarding what levels of proficiency in each language should characterize the language behavior of bilingual children and the impact of language exposure or language use variables on bilingual performance. This study was designed to examine the extent to which years of exposure to a language(s), amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language(s) relate to observed bilingual performance in young children, as obtained from parent and teacher reports. A secondary goal was to determine the extent to which parents or teachers could assist in determining language status by examining relationships between their ratings of the child's use and proficiency in the two languages and the child's grammatical performance. Fifty-seven children and their families were sampled from second grade classes of a large school district serving primarily low-income families in southern California. Multiple regression analyses for each language indicated that amount of Spanish input at home was a significant predictor of grammatical performance in that language. These input effects did not hold for English. Although there were some crosslinguistic differences, parent and teacher ratings of use and proficiency correlated with the child's grammatical performance in the target language. The findings suggest that parent and teacher estimates may be useful to determine bilingual status.

The study examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Because native speakers of Arabic first learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking, it was hypothesized that the linguistic differences between the two varieties, the so-called diglossic variables, would interfere with the acquisition of basic reading processes in MSA. Two diglossic variables were examined: phoneme and word syllabic structure. The children's phoneme isolation and pseudoword decoding skills were tested. The results showed that both diglossic variables interfered with the children's performance of both tasks in both grades. The findings support the role of linguistic distance in the acquisition of basic reading processes in a diglossic context.

The current study examined the effect of story presentation rates on story recall performance in 35 individuals with Down syndrome and 3 control groups (35 mental age matched, 35 syntax comprehension matched, and 35 syntax production matched children). Three short audiotaped stories were presented to each individual at three different rates (normal, storyteller [slow with expressive inflections], and slow rate). The effect of group but not rate was significant. Individuals with Down syndrome recalled more content words than the production-matched group and the production-matched group recalled fewer content words than the mental age matched and comprehension-matched groups. The results were interpreted in relation to working memory deficits in individuals with Down syndrome, developmental change in story recall of typically developing children, and the contribution of syntax comprehension to story recall.

This study investigated the ability to discriminate the middle and low tone contrasts in Thai by two groups of native English (NE) speakers and a control group of native Thai (NT) speakers. The first group was comprised of NE speakers who had no prior experience with Thai, whereas subjects in the second group were experienced learners of Thai (EE). The variables under investigation were experience with Thai, discrimination of open versus closed syllables, and the interstimulus interval (ISI) of the presentation (500 vs 1500 ms). The results obtained indicated that the NT group obtained higher discrimination scores than the NE or EE groups, the EE group obtained higher discrimination scores than the NE group, all three groups of subjects found open syllables to be more difficult to discriminate than closed syllables, and subjects in the EE group obtained higher discrimination scores for open syllables in the shorter than the longer ISI condition.

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development.

This study investigated the effects of first language word-level reading skills on the development of English as a second language (ESL) word-level reading skills. A crosslinguistic analysis indicates that native Arabic and Japanese speakers are likely to encounter different types of ESL word-level reading difficulties. Specifically, native Arab speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with prelexical ESL word recognition processes, whereas native Japanese speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with on-line ESL word integration processes that integrate words into phrase/clause structures for comprehension. Results from a lexical decision task showed that a group of Japanese ESL learners had significantly faster and more accurate word recognition skills compared to a proficiency-matched Arab ESL group. In contrast, both groups read words within sentences in a sentence reading task at the same speed, though the Arab ESL group was significantly more accurate in integrating words into larger phrase and clause units and comprehending them than the Japanese ESL group. These results indicate that Arab and Japanese ESL students have different word-level reading difficulties, implicating different learning needs and pedagogical interventions for developing ESL reading proficiency.

Ten native Chinese-speaking children and adolescents who immigrated to the United States between ages 5 and 16 were studied for 3 years. The changes in their language preferences, language environments, and proficiency in English, their second language (L2), as well as Chinese, their first language (L1), were measured quantitatively and qualitatively. Participants with arrival ages of 9 or younger switched their language preference from L1 to L2 within the first year, were exposed to a significantly richer L2 than L1 environment, and became more proficient in L2 than in L1. The older participants maintained their preference for L1 across the 3 years, were exposed to a significantly richer L1 than L2 environment, and maintained L1 as the more proficient language. Interactions among L1 proficiency, peer interactions, social abilities, and cultural preferences jointly influenced the dominant language switch or maintenance processes.

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.

Recent years have seen a whole series of book-length studies on the formal semantics of plurality and its relation to coordination, quantifier scope, and related phenomena (Landman, 2000; Lasersohn, 1995; Schein, 1993; Schwarzschild, 1996; etc.). Winter's book provides a very interesting and worthwhile addition to this list, and shows that despite the extensive attention this subject has received, there is a good deal more to be said.

This volume consists of 38 papers presented at the summer 2000 meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, hosted by Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. The scope of the collection is ambitious in many respects. All levels of linguistic analysis are covered, from pragmatics through to acoustics, although approximately two thirds of the papers deal with phonology and phonetics. The full range of ages is represented, from a paper by John Locke on the functions of infant babbling through to Jacqueline Guendozi and Nicole Muller's paper on repair strategies in the conversation of an elderly subject with Alzheimer disease. The majority of the papers consider developmental and acquired disorders, although a few consider normal and bilingual language development. Although English is the most frequently studied language, data from Arabic, Greek, Korean, Portugese, Putonghua, Swedish, and several other languages are also featured. The editors are justly proud of the international feel to the research, with contributors working on five continents.

This concise overview of English as an international language is written so clearly that not only does it provide an excellent discussion of the major issues in the field, but it also is a highly enjoyable book to read. The central premise in this book is that English is in fact an international language par excellence, and that teaching it as such and doing research in it calls for unique approaches and methodologies.

The timing of this book is perfect. Optimality theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 1993) has been a popular framework for phonological exploration since its conception. This is not to say that it has been embraced by everyone working in the field. Rather, it has generated a great deal of intellectual debate and research, creating a sense of revitalization in the field of phonology.

This book presents a personal view of working with young children who have communication problems. It is aimed at practitioners working in early years settings, including nursery teachers, teaching assistants, speech and language therapists, and parents. Fleur Griffiths communicates her practice with heartfelt conviction. The reader is left with some vivid pictures of how successful interactions can be achieved between children with communication difficulties and adults. She also describes some useful techniques for working with children. Because the book is aimed primarily at practitioners, the author might assume that her readers have knowledge of communication problems. However, the range of speech and language difficulties, the plethora of names and labels for these difficulties, the lack of precision in the use of the labels, and the differing and often competing theories of language development and disorder make it almost obligatory for an author to specify what is meant by children with communication problems and to define what is meant by any technical term or piece of professional jargon the author might use. These terms are generally not clearly defined (e.g., the age range that corresponds to “early years” is not specified). For a lay reader, this lack of context and explanation could make parts of this book difficult to follow, with terms like semantic-pragmatics and phrases like “moments of agency with a synchronous partner” (p. 23) left poorly defined.

The third edition of this book was published in 2002. The editors explain its development from courses run at the Department of Human Communication Science, University College London, for nonspecialists who wanted to understand the speech and language problems of young children. Overall, it is successful in this aim.

Phonology is usually explained as the study of speech sounds and their patterns and functions in the lexical representation of speakers of languages (Kenstowicz, 1994; Spencer, 1996). Some years ago the question, “Where's phonology?” was raised by Macken (1992) in the context of the large concern with the phonetics of acquisition and the conception of phonological acquisition as acquisition of phonetics. This division between phonology and phonetics may be traced to the work of the Prague School of Trubetzkoy (1939/1969) and earlier. Macken proposed a relatively autonomous phonological component, with perceptual, articulatory, and phonological-based abstract rules and principles, to account for learners' lexical representation and suggested a hierarchy of prosodic words, segments, and features as the basis of phonological acquisition (Macken, 1979, 1992). Recent emphasis is on the interaction among phonology, phonetics, and psychology, and this integrative approach has implications for studying common crosslinguistic speech sound patterns (Ohala, 1999). Phonology is further seen as addressing the questions of rules and representations, which may apply to “compute the phonetic representation” within the framework of universal grammar (Kenstowicz, 1994, p. 10).