This study examined differences between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with specific problems in reading comprehension (i.e., poor comprehenders) on measures of language ability, including overall ability, auditory processing, receptive and expressive language, and syntactic ability related to text retellings. Differences were related to performance on free and probed comprehension of expository passages varying in syntactic structure and discourse type. Poor comprehending students differed from normally achieving students on all language measures and in the manner in which reader-related and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results support the positive role of syntactic ability in text comprehension, differences in free and probed recall responses, and the facilitating effect of structured text on recall.

In this article, we present data from a longitudinal investigation of the development of language and communicative skills in infants suffering from focal brain injury in the pre- or perinatal period. We focus on phonological analyses of babbling and first words, and parental reports of the use of gestures for communicative purposes, word comprehension, and word production. Results indicate that all children were delayed in the number of gestures they were reported to produce, as well as in reported lexical production. Reported comprehension was also typically well below age level; however, age-appropriate comprehension was observed in one child throughout the period sampled. Phonological analyses revealed both similarities and differences between the early vocalizations of the neurologically involved children and those of the control group. Most notably, the vocalizations of the children with brain injury contained a smaller proportion of “true” consonants at the earliest session. The children who showed an increase in the proportion of consonant production by the third testing session were those who had also begun to produce words by this period. Thus, phonological and lexical developments were both observed during the period studied here, with improvement most evident in children with damage to anterior (as opposed to posterior) brain areas. Lastly, like normally developing children, children with brain injury displayed idiosyncratic patterns of consonant articulation. These tendencies were observed in all vocalizations, both babble and words, suggesting that continuity of consonant place and manner is evident even in the face of general delay in the acquisition of communicative abilities.

The present study evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The same picture description task was given to 12 hearing subjects using spoken Italian, 12 deaf subjects using Italian Sign Language, and 12 hearing subjects using pantomime. Nonreversible, reversible, and locative productions with two elements were elicited. The results showed that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. The pattern of similarities and differences found among the three experimental conditions allows us to argue that the order of signs in the sentence is sensitive to modality as well as linguistic factors depending on the particular sentence structures considered.

This study compared the narrative abilities of mildly mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Twenty mildly mentally retarded children and 20 nonretarded children, matched on mental age, PPVT-R scores, and SES were audiotaped while narrating a wordless picture book story. Results showed no differences between the groups in narrative length, use of tense and conjunctions, and use of narrative devices. However, there were significant differences in use of reference, with the mildly retarded children using more definite article + noun character introductions, showing more pronoun confusion, and more often pronominalizing all references to the story protagonist. Control of reference in narrative is discussed as presenting a particularly challenging set of discourse abilities because it requires the child to integrate knowledge across a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic domains.

An African Grey parrot, Alex, who had learned to use English speech in studies on referential interspecies communication and animal cognition, produced English monologues in both the presence and absence of human receivers. This study examines one component of Alex’s monologue behavior, private speech, while he was being taught new vocalizations. His private speech during those time periods included a small percentage of novel utterances, not yet used in the presence of his caretakers, that were phonologically related to, but not exact reproductions of, the new vocalizations. His monologues also contained utterances that were part of the general daily routine as well as the specific training paradigm, but rarely included verbatim reproductions of the training scenario. Alex’s behaviors were comparable to those of children in the early stages of language acquisition. Because monologue behavior has been characterized as a form of practice that facilitates human language development, the data are discussed in terms of the possible functions of monologues during Alex’s acquisition of novel vocalizations.

Phonological processes have been used to describe children’s speech for a number of years, but the causes of most processes remain unexplained. In a study investigating possible sources of processes in children’s speech, Aitchison and Chiat (1981) suggested that many developmental phonological processes may be a result of problems in lexical storage and retrieval. One limitation of their study, however, was that they had no adult control group, whose results might have helped clarify their findings. The present research with adults was similar to Aitchison and Chiat’s investigation with children and was intended to provide additional information about whether children’s typical phonological processes generally involve lexical storage and recall difficulties. Caution is advised in assuming that children’s spontaneous phonological processes are generally a result of lexical storage and recall factors.

Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological proficiency. For all groups, a strong curvilinear association between measures was found across the MLU range from 1.0 to about 4.5. Correlations were weaker when MLU exceeded 3.0 than during earlier stages of language development, however, confirming previous suggestions that MLU becomes less closely associated with grammatical development as linguistic proficiency increases. For the language-disordered groups, moreover, the curves relating the two measures differed from the curves for the normal preschoolers because MLU frequently overestimated actual IPSyn scores. The results are discussed with respect to the use of MLU in conjunction with other measures of syntactic complexity in the study of atypical language development.

Initiation of communication in videotaped, unstructured mother–child interactions was examined in two groups of 2-year-olds: those with normal language development and those with late acquisition of expressive language. Results revealed that the late-talkers (LTs) expressed significantly fewer intentions, but that the difference between the two groups could be accounted for entirely by the difference in one type of intention: the expression of joint attentional intentions. Investigation of the forms of expression of intentions showed that the normal group used significantly more verbal forms of expression, as expected. The predominant form for the normal group was word combinations, while the predominant form for the LTs was vocalization. The implications of these results for understanding the mechanisms involved in early language delay are discussed.

Comprehension of six syntactic structures was tested across four age groups. Each structure was presented with both plausible and implausible content. The contribution of cognitive nonlinguistic factors important for comprehension (attention, short-term memory, and mental control) was tested via standard neuropsychological tasks. Sixty-six women aged 30–79 were tested. Both errors and reaction times increased with age, especially for more complex syntactic types and implausible sentences. The neuropsychological factors tested contributed minimally to an age-related decline in comprehension, suggesting that the subtle breakdown seen in syntactic processing may be a language-specific impairment.

This report presents the results of the second year of a 4-year longitudinal evaluation of a partial French immersion program in Cincinnati, Ohio. This program is of particular interest because it includes children from lower socioeconomic group and ethnic minority group (black) backgrounds in addition to majority group (white), middle-class students who have been the subject of virtually all evaluations of immersion to date. The native language development (English), academic achievement (math), and second language attainment (French) of pilot groups of middle- and working-class students and of black and white students who were in grade 1, as well as those of a follow-up cohort of kindergarten students, were assessed. The results showed that performance differences in English and mathematics between subgroups of students did not depend on the program of instruction they were receiving. Moreover, it was found that the working-class and black students scored as well as the middle-class and white students on the French language tests. The results are discussed further in terms of the immersion students’ level of proficiency in French.

This study investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script – Chinese. Since the Chinese ideographic script can be read with more than one dialectal pronunciation, a reader who has learned to read in two dialects will have two pronunciations for the same word stored in his memory. Thus, interference effects will occur. Sixteen subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese were tested in a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words that were pronounced the same or differently in one or both of the dialects. That automatic phonetic activation would occur even for an ideographic script such as Chinese was supported by the results.

In an experiment based on the competition model, 12 native Japanese speakers (J1 group) and 12 native English speakers studying Japanese (JFL group) were requested to report sentence subjects after listening to Japanese word strings which consisted of one verb and two nouns each. Similarly, 12 native English speakers (E1 group) and 12 native Japanese speakers studying English (EFL group) reported the sentence subjects of English word strings. In each word string, syntactic (word order) cues and lexical-semantic (animacy/inanimacy) cues converged or diverged as to the assignment of the sentence subjects. The results show that JFL-Ss (experimental subjects) closely approximated the response patterns of J1-Ss, while EFL-Ss showed evidence of transfer from their first language, Japanese. The results are consistent with the developmental precedence of a meaning-based comprehension strategy over a grammar-based one.

Children between 3–5 years who knew the alphabet but could not read were given three tasks. In the first, they decided which of two words was longer when the word pairs were presented orally, in writing, or accompanying pictures. In the second, they “read” a word when it accompanied a picture of the named object and then again when it was placed with a picture of a different object. Finally, they were given a set of plastic letters with which they could create their own words. Although all the children had explicit knowledge of letters and sounds, they lacked symbolic knowledge of how letters represent sounds. This symbolic knowledge, it is claimed, is a precondition to learning to read.

This study investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the actor role in French sentences. Native speakers showed strong use of clitic pronoun agreement, followed by much weaker use of verb agreement, an even weaker use of noun animacy, and negligible use of word order. This ranking reflects the importance of these cues in naturally occurring French sentences involving conflicts among cues in conjunction with a learning-on-error model. The English/French bilinguals did not manifest English-like strategies of word order preference on the French sentences; rather, they showed a cue ranking very similar to that of native speakers, although detectability may have played a role in their use of verb agreement. The failure of English word order strategies to correctly interpret many naturally occurring French sentences may be responsible for the adaptation of strategies appropriate to the second language.

A group of 54 children with specific language impairment was compared with a control group on a referential communication task in which the child was asked to describe a picture from an array of eight similar items so that the listener could identify it. The language-impaired children performed more poorly than age-matched controls. However, there was no relationship between referential communication performance and conversational ability. Children who provided excessive and irrelevant information in conversation did not show the same characteristics in the experimental setting. Formal task requirements, such as the need to scan an array, appeared to be a major determinant of performance on structured referential communication tasks. These tasks are not sensitive to the types of pragmatic difficulty that some children have in open-ended conversation.

Speech sound production changes that occurred during acquisition of the initial voicing contrast induced through treatment in phonologically disordered children were compared to those that occurred during normal acquisition of the contrast. Target stop productions from three normally developing children and six phonologically disordered children were analyzed acoustically along the temporal measure of VOT. The phonologically disordered subjects displayed different patterns of voicing contrast acquisition, none of which replicated the normally developing children's pattern. The phonologically disordered children's patterns of acquisition were characterized by larger and more variable VOT values in comparison to those of the normally developing children. Different patterns of voicing contrast acquisition observed in VOTs are discussed with regard to the nature of linguistic change and the source of breakdown in children's speech sound errors.

This study explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. Evidence suggesting that 6-year-olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments was obtained by asking children to imitate complex words, omit specified portions, and discuss the meaning of the resulting word parts. Trial items represent a variety of instances in which phonetic forms differ from underlying representations. Although language-advanced first graders produced stronger evidence suggesting morphophonemic segments than language-delayed age-mates, and young adults supplied stronger evidence than either first-grade group; strength of evidence leads to the interpretation that even language-delayed 6-year-olds form morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between groups probably derive from differences in metalinguistic abilities and linguistic experience rather than from differences in units of phonological processing.

It has recently been suggested that the developmental association between nonword repetition performance and vocabulary knowledge reflects the contribution of phonological memory processes to vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). An alternative account of the association is that the child uses existing vocabulary knowledge to support memory for nonwords. The present article tests between these two alternative accounts by evaluating the role of phonological memory and linguistic factors in nonword repetition. In a longitudinal database, repetition accuracy in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds was found to be sensitive to two independent factors: a phonological memory factor, nonword length, and a linguistic factor, wordlikeness. To explain these combined influences, it is suggested that repeating nonwords involves temporary phonological memory storage which may be supported by either a specific lexical analogy or by an appropriate abstract phonological frame generated from structurally similar vocabulary items.

This study was designed to test the prediction that, whereas sensitivity to subsyllabic phonological units might emerge prior to alphabetic reading instruction, phonemic analysis skills develop as a consequence of reading instruction. A series of phonological oddity tasks was devised, assessing children's sensitivity to subsyllabic onset and rime units, and to phonemes. These tasks were administered to three groups of children. The first group comprised the oldest children of a sample of kindergarten children. The second and third groups comprised the youngest and oldest children from a first-grade sample. The kindergarten group was equivalent to the younger first-grade group in terms of general verbal maturity, but had not been exposed to reading instruction. The younger first-grade sample was verbally less mature than the older first-grade sample, but had equivalent exposure to reading instruction. On all tasks, both first-grade groups performed at equivalent levels, and both groups did better than the kindergarten group. In all groups, onset and rime unity oddity tasks were of equal difficulty, but phoneme oddity tasks were more difficult than rime oddity tasks. Although some of the kindergarten children could reliably focus on onset and rime units, none performed above chance on the phoneme oddity tasks. Further analyses indicated that rime/onset oddity performance explained variation in very early reading achievement more reliably than phoneme oddity performance.

Six native speakers of Mandarin Chinese recorded 140 preselected utterances in three role-play contexts that differentially elicited registers of babytalk to presyllabic infants (BTP), foreign language instruction (FLI), and adult conversation (AC). Sound spectrograms were used to obtain 10 measures of fundamental frequency (Fo) patterns for comparisons among the three registers. In FLI, the speakers expanded Fo patterns in time and Fo range in comparison with AC. They clarified lexical tonal information and seemed to reduce suprasegmental information. In BTP, the speakers raised peak and minimum Fo, reduced the rate of Fo fluctuations, and increased the proportion of terminal rising contours. The speakers reduced, neglected, or modified lexical tonal information in favor of simplified and clarified intonation contours. The significance of the results is discussed in relation to tone acquisition in children and to a universal intuitive didactic competence in caretakers.