The goal of the present investigation was to identify the reading processes that are impaired in children whose digit naming speeds are slow. Continuous digit naming speed was assumed to measure the automaticity with which character codes may be accessed in memory, and the automaticity of this process was assumed to be a prerequisite for the accurate performance of higher level reading processes. In Study I it was found, for children in grades 1 through 3, that digit naming speed was reliably correlated with reading of both irregularly spelled words and pronounceable nonsense words, and that most of the variance shared by irregular-word and nonsense-word reading was accounted for by digit naming speed. These results were interpreted as evidence that character-identification automaticity is equally important to the direct-access and speech-recoding routes of word recognition. Models of how character-identification automaticity might affect each of these routes are discussed. In Study 2 it was found, for children in grades 4 through 10, that the correlation of digit naming speed with reading comprehension was significantly smaller than its correlation with word recognition, and that the former correlation was completely accounted for when either WISC-R verbal IQ or word-recognition accuracy was controlled. These results are contrasted with comparable results reported by other investigators, and methodological differences are noted.

A spelling-age match design was used to test the hypothesis that deficits in phonologically related skills may be causally related to difficulties in acquiring basic spelling knowledge. Poor grade 5 spellers, average grade 3 spellers, and good grade 2 spellers matched on a standardized spelling test, and a group of good grade 5 spellers matched by chronological age with the poor grade 5 spellers were administered a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and an experimental spelling test containing words of the following four types: exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords. Consistent with the hypothesis, it was found that when compared with the poor spellers, the average and good spellers performed better on the phonemic segmentation task, made fewer errors in spelling pseudowords, and made spelling errors that were more phonetically accurate.

On the basis of prior research and a theoretical analysis of picture naming, we examined three correlates of child picture naming difficulty: age of name acquisition, picture-to-name uncertainty, and name generality (instance or category names). Study 1 demonstrated that late age of acquisition and high adult name uncertainty were associated with increased naming difficulty for both single instance and category items from the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) (Gardner, 1979). Age of acquisition was a particularly strong predictor for instance items. Moreover, category pictures were more difficult to name than single instance pictures with names of comparable age of acquisition. In Study 2, analysis of incorrect responses to category pictures demonstrated that children made more instance errors than adults, but not more errors of other kinds. Study 2 also showed that a child uncertainty measure correlated more strongly with EOWPVT item difficulty than the adult measure of Study 1. The findings suggest that picture naming scores reflect both the availability of the names in lexical memory and their accessibility, which, in turn, partly depend on the amount of interference from competing responses. Some implications for the interpretation and remediation of picture naming deficits are suggested.

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.

The goal of this article is to investigate whether the acquisition of some morpho-syntactic aspects in Italian deaf adolescents is simply delayed with respect to hearing children, or whether it follows significantly different developmental patterns. Twenty-five deaf students (age range: 11–15 years) and a group of 125 hearing controls (age range: 6–16 years) performed four tests, administered in written form, relative to different grammatical aspects: plurals, articles, and clitic pronouns. Results showed three different patterns of development depending on the grammatical aspect considered. Deaf children compared to hearing controls showed normal development in the pluralization task, delayed development in the pronoun task, and a qualitatively different pattern in the article task.

The special features of speech addressed to autistic children by their mothers and fathers were examined in an effort to clarify how the child's level of functioning influenced parental language style. A total of 12 children, 6 boys and 6 girls, half of whom were higher functioning and verbal and the remainder lower functioning and nonverbal, were videotaped in a 15-minute interaction with their mothers and fathers. The total number of utterances used was comparable for mothers and fathers, but mothers employed shorter mean lengths of utterance and more prompts to elicit speech or motoric activity when their children were lower functioning and nonverbal than when they were higher functioning and verbal. The higher functioning, verbal children were more frequently reinforced for speech, while the lower functioning, nonverbal children were more likely to be given indirect directives. Fathers issued direct directives more frequently than mothers, while mothers were more likely to employ prompts to stimulate their children's speech, particularly when they were lower functioning. Thus, both mothers and fathers of autistic children appear to be sensitive to their child's particular presenting characteristics, but differ in how they accommodate to them.