This study examines the contribution of early phonological processing (PP) and language skills on later phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), as well as the links among PA, MA, and reading. Children 4–6 years of age with poor PP at the start of school showed weaker PA and MA 3 years later (age 7–9), regardless of their language skills. PA and phonological and morphological strategies predict reading accuracy, whereas MA predicts reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that children with poor early PP are more at risk of developing deficits in MA and PA than children with poor language. They also suggest that there is a direct link between PA and reading accuracy and between MA and reading comprehension that cannot be accounted for by strategy use at the word level.

The argument structure complexity hypothesis (Thompson, 2003) was introduced to account for the verb production pattern of agrammatic patients, who show greater difficulty in producing transitive versus unergative verbs (argument number effect) and in producing unaccusative versus unergative verbs (syntactic movement effect). The present study investigates these two effects in the reading performance of a patient (GR) suffering from deep dyslexia. GR read nouns significantly better than verbs; moreover, her performance was better on unergative than on transitive verbs, whereas the comparison between unergative and unaccusative verbs did not differ significantly. Data support the extension of the argument structure complexity hypothesis to word naming and suggest that the two aspects of argument structure complexity occur at different levels within models of lexical processing.

We investigated when children acquire class extension rules for denominal verbs and deverbal nouns using an intermodal preferential looking paradigm. We taught French-speaking 2.5-year-olds (mean age = 2 years, 8.56 months [2;8.56], range = 2;6–2;11) and 3-year-olds (mean age = 3;3.31, range = 3;0–3;5) novel parent nouns or verbs referring to unfamiliar instruments and their functions, and then tested their interpretation of both the parent word and its denominal verb or deverbal noun. Experiment 1 demonstrated that only the 3-year-olds understood the denominal verbs. Experiment 2 demonstrated that only 3-year-olds who learned the parent verbs were able to interpret the deverbal nouns correctly. These findings suggest that French-speaking children acquire class extension rules for denominal verbs and deverbal nouns by the age of 3 years and can demonstrate this knowledge as long as they are able to learn the parent words.

English and many other languages allow flexible ordering of main and subordinate clauses in complex sentences. Processing, discourse-pragmatics, and semantics have an impact on the ordering of information. Three-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults heard complex sentences containing main and subordinate clauses with differing informational status. Using an act-out method, we analyzed participants’ sensitivity to the ordering of new/given information and its interaction with clause order. All age groups changed the order of information to given–new when exposed to a new–given structure, whereas only adults changed the clause order to subordinate–main when exposed to the reverse. We suggest that children are sensitive to information structure but not clause order in complex sentences. The results are discussed in the context of possible limited processing capacities or understanding of clause order function in complex sentences.

This study considers the effects of experimental task demands in research on second language sentence processing. Advanced learners and native speakers of French were presented with the same experimental sentences in two different tasks designed to probe for evidence of trace reactivation during processing: cross-modal priming (Nicol & Swinney, 1989) and probe classification during reading (Dekydtspotter, Miller, Schaefer, Chang, & Kim, 2010). Although the second language learners produced nontargetlike results on the cross-modal priming task, the probe classification during reading task revealed results suggestive of trace reactivation, which point to detailed structural representations during online sentence processing. The implications for current theories of second language sentence processing and for future research in this domain are discussed.

This study investigates the extent to which the production of complex morphosyntactic structures can be modulated in agrammatic speakers by utilizing a syntactic priming paradigm. Italian clitic pronouns (varying in morphosyntactic complexity) were chosen as the focal linguistic structure under investigation to test hypotheses based on alternative theories. Three experiments were performed. Experiment 1 analyzed clitic production in spontaneous speech. Experiments 2 and 3 used syntactic priming to prime the production of direct- and indirect-object clitics in finite and in restructuring sentences. These structures critically require different clitic positions (finite sentences: before the finite verb; restructuring sentences: before or after the verbal complex). The pattern of results shows that agrammatic speakers are impaired in clitic production. However, they show that the deficit is quantitative rather than qualitative, suggesting residual sensitivity despite the poor performance. The findings demonstrate that agrammatic (and control) speakers show a positive effect of syntactic priming across clitic types, suggesting that agrammatism can be characterized in terms of a linguistic processing deficit owing to increased processing demands for complex linguistic structures. Specifically, it is suggested that morphosyntactic complexity modulates both the level of impairment and the effect of priming for these grammatical structures.

This article investigates knowledge of discourse-conditioned left dislocations in the interlanguage competence in Spanish and English second language learners. Although Spanish clitic left dislocation (CLLD) and English topicalization are functionally very similar, they differ in that the former but not the latter requires the dislocated phrase to be clitic doubled. In contrast, the fronted focus (FF) construction is functionally and syntactically similar in the two languages. Two experimental studies investigated knowledge of the syntactic form and discourse appropriateness of CLLD and topicalization, using knowledge of FF as a baseline. English-native learners of Spanish were successful in acquiring CLLD as well as FF. However, Spanish-native learners of English demonstrated no knowledge of English topicalization even at near-native levels of proficiency, whereas they did well on the transferable FF. These results are examined in the light of the interface hypothesis. It is argued that construction frequency in the input and transfer from the native language, but only those two factors together, can explain the experimental results.

This paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse-pragmatic feature contrast, as applied to the subject, verb, or object of a transitive utterance affected the provision of elements in the remainder of the sentence when all elements were previously introduced. The results showed that 3.5-year-old children were more likely to realize a contrasted argument with a lexical noun but more likely to omit the argument when it was not part of a contrast, regardless of its subject or object status. This suggests that contrast presents a unifying discourse feature for argument omission in language development.

Speech intelligibility in a multitalker background can be affected by the language of both the talker and the interfering speech. This study investigated whether this interaction is modulated by dialect variations of the same language. American English listeners were presented with target sentences in either their own General American English (GAE) or a different accent (Southern American English [SAE]) masked by either GAE or SAE two-talker babble at three sound to noise ratios (SNRs): +3, 0, and –3 dB. All speech materials were produced by male talkers. Across all conditions, SAE target was more intelligible than GAE. Intelligibility of either target decreased as the level of the interfering babble noise increased. Target accent interacted with masking accent: at +3 dB SNR, GAE (and not SAE) was the more effective masker. The target-masker interaction was different as listening conditions deteriorated: at 0 and –3 dB SNR, masking accent did not affect GAE target, but when the target was SAE, the SAE masker (and not GAE) was more effective. Thus, at increased noise levels, listeners benefited from the mismatch between the target and masking accents only when the target was in a nonnative accent. These results demonstrate that dialect variation can influence listeners’ performance in a multitalker environment. The apparent asymmetry in intelligibility of accents may be in part related to dialect-specific prosodic and phonetic features.

It has been suggested that the language problems encountered in specific language impairment (SLI) arise from basal ganglia abnormalities that lead to impaired procedural memory. However, recent serial reaction time (SRT) studies did not reveal any differences between the SLI and typically developing (TD) groups on the measures of procedural memory linked to visual sequence learning. In this paper, 16 children with and without SLI were compared on two versions of SRT tasks: a visual task and an auditory one. The results showed that children with SLI were as fast as their TD peers in both modalities. All of the children obtained similar specific sequence learning indices, indicating that they were able to detect regularities in both modalities. Although children with SLI were as accurate as their TD peers for the visual SRT task, they made more errors than their TD peers in auditory SRT conditions. The results indicate that, in relation to procedural memory, the core of the impairment in SLI is not linked to difficulties in the detection of regularities. We argue that when children with SLI present some difficulties, the children's weaknesses might depend on the type of processing involved (e.g., tasks involving auditory sequences).

This commentary was not included with the original publication of the issue, but it has now been added to the online version.