Nineteen language-impaired (LI) and 20 language-normal (LN) children participated in an on-line word-monitoring task. Words were presented in lists and in sentences readily comprehended by younger children. The sentences were unaltered, tow-pass filtered, and time- compressed. Both groups had shorter mean response times (MRTs), but lower accuracy, for words in sentences than words in lists. The LI children had significantly longer MRTs under sentence conditions and lower accuracy overall than the LN children. Filtering had an adverse effect upon accuracy and MRT for both subject groups. Time compression did not, suggesting that the reduction in high-frequency information and the rate of presentation exert different effects. Subject differences in attention, as well as in linguistic competence and motor control, may have influenced word-monitoring performance.

This study investigated narrative abilities and their relation to theory of mind in autistic and mentally retarded subjects, who were matched for their linguistic competence on standardized measures of comprehension and production. We asked 27 autistic, 27 mentally retarded, and 17 normal subjects (whose age range matched the verbal mental age ranges of the developmentally disordered groups) to tell the story from a wordless picture book. Following their spontaneous narratives, a set of probe questions was asked about the story characters' feeling states. The autistic and mentally retarded subjects were also given a standard test of false belief. The main findings were that, when closely matched on language ability, no significant group differences were found on measures of narrative length, use of lexical cohesion devices, and mental state terms. On the probed questions, the autistic and mentally retarded subjects gave fewer appropriate emotion responses than the normal subjects, and the autistic subjects had difficulty explaining the emotional states correctly. For the autistic sample, the narrative measures were significantly correlated with performance on the theory of mind task. The findings are interpreted in terms of the contributions of both linguistic and social–cognitive factors in narrative ability.

American Sign Language (ASL) provides a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of late exposure to a primary language on adult linguistic processing. In Experiment 1, a video sign-monitoring task was used to investigate the grammatical sensitivity of 11 native signers (exposed to ASL from birth) and 10 late signers (exposed to ASL at a mean age of 12 years) to errors in ASL verb agreement. The results indicated that native signers, but not late signers, were sensitive to errors in verb agreement. Experiment 2 utilized both sign monitoring and off-line grammaticality judgments. Sentences which contained errors in either verb agreement or temporal aspect were presented to 10 native signers, 10 early signers (exposed to ASL between the ages of 2 and 7), and 10 late signers (exposed to ASL between the ages of 10 and 20). The results indicated that native signers were sensitive to errors in both verb agreement and aspect, and that early and late signers were only sensitive to errors in aspect morphology. In the off-line grammaticality test, all three groups were equally able consciously to detect the grammatical errors. These findings suggest that late exposure to a primary language affects the on-line integration of verb agreement information within a sentence, but does not affect sensitivity to semantic distinctions encoded by aspect morphology.

The present study examined the phonological memory capacity, rate of articulation, phonological-encoding, and perceptual-processing abilities of 13 well-defined, specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and 13 younger, language-matched normal (NL) children. The results of a nonsense word repetition task showed that SLI children repeated significantly fewer multisyllabic nonsense words than their NL peers. However, SLI and NL children were found to have comparable articulation rates, even when producing the longest nonsense word stimuli. Both SLI and NL children showed sensitivity to the phonological similarity effect, indicating that SLI children had intact phonological-encoding abilities. The results of a nonsense word discrimination task revealed that SLI children had greater difficulty perceptually processing 4-syllable nonsense words. Taken together, these findings were interpreted to be consistent with Gathercole and Baddeley's (1990) claim that SLI children have reduced phonological storage capacity. However, the capacity deficit account may require revision to include the possibility that the phonological storage deficit of some SLI children may have a perceptual basis (i.e., difficulty with processes related to item identification).

To evaluate the effect of extended adult exposure to authentic spoken English on the perceptual mastery of English /r/ and /l/, we tested 12 native speakers of English (A), 12 experienced Japanese (EJ) who had spent 12 or more years in the United States, and 12 less experienced Japanese (LJ) who had spent less than one year in the United States. The tests included the forced-choice identification of naturally produced /r/s and /1/s and the labeling of word-initial synthetic tokens that varied F2 and F3 to form an /r/-/l/-/w/ continuum. The F.Js’ mean performance in both tasks was closer to that of the As than the LJs, but nonetheless fell short. Extended exposure may improve /r/-/l/ identification accuracy; it does not ensure perfect perceptual mastery.

In an earlier study, Service (1992) found that phonological short-term memory, reflected in the ability to repeat English-sounding pseudowords, was a good predictor of learning English as a foreign language over a period of three school years. This study attempts to find out to what extent foreign vocabulary learning is the critical learning process related to pseudoword repetition accuracy. Regression analyses on repetition data and learning measures revealed significant correlations between pseudoword repetition and foreign language learning, even after a measure of general academic achievement had been partialed out. In a fixed-order multiple regression analysis – with predictors entered in the order of general academic achievement, foreign language vocabulary, and pseudoword repetition – no additional variance in any foreign language measure studied could be accounted for by pseudoword repetition in the third step. When vocabulary in the second step was replaced by performance in foreign language essay writing or the correct reproduction of dictated discourse – both highly related to overall foreign language performance – repetition significantly increased the proportion of accounted variance, especially for two foreign language vocabulary tasks and a listening comprehension task. Phonological memory may, therefore, be specifically related to foreign vocabulary learning.

Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Alverson and Rosenberg (1990) reviewed this technique. Such analyses properly imply the necessity and value of a broad approach to language and language use. To be optimally useful, cohesion analysis must be seen in its theoretical context. Cohesion is one means of creating text, and therefore it cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. Cohesion may realize elements of register and code, but these concepts are distinct and account for different kinds of variation in language use. As a research tool, cohesion is one initial step of linguistic analysis that can meet the dual criteria of both an analysis of language in context and in reliability.

This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower level analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of the variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved to facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and text cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.

Toddlers in the lowest tenth percentile for lexical production, based on parental report (late talkers), were compared with age- and language-matched controls on measures of phonetic complexity, lexical development, and grammatical complexity. Late talkers were placed in the pre-meaningful speech group if they produced fewer than 10 different words or in the meaningful speech group if they produced more than 10 different words in a spontaneous language sample. Late talkers who had entered the meaningful speech stage scored higher than those who had not on most of the measures of phonology, lexical, and grammatical complexity in intelligible speech, but not on measures of phonological development in babble. These results are compatible with other studies that found an overlap between phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as with those that suggested the importance of true consonant production for lexical development.

This article reports on a longitudinal examination of the relationship between productive phonological ability and phonological awareness in children under 6 years of age. This study followed 45 subjects with variant productive phonology levels from the mean age of 3;6 to 6;0. The Khan-Lewis Phonological Analysis (KLPA) (Khan & Lewis, 1976), which ranks children from 0 to 4 on phonological process usage, was given at 6-month intervals, along with two measures of phonological awareness. Logit analysis showed that children with poor productive phonology, as measured by process usage, had a lower probability of meeting criterion on both of the phonological awareness measures. Further, a change in KLPA rank from poor to good speech predicted significant exponential increases in the probability of success on the two dependent variables. We concluded that, as a child matures in productive phonology, accompanying exponential growth in phonological awareness occurs.

The concept of proficient bilingualism or biliteracy (proficiency in reading and writing in both Spanish and English) has.been used in research on linguistic and academic processes among Mexican American children, but rarely has it been used to examine noncognitive outcomes in this population. Biliteracy – a quality that strengthens cultural identity and facilitates adaptation to the mainstream society – hypothetically contributes to the growth of self-esteem among Mexican Americans. Biliteracy is arguably more relevant to the development of self-concept among Mexican American children than Spanish proficiency or a general notion of bilingualism. Drawing on data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS 88), this article compares self-deprecation, self-confidence, and fatalistic belief among Mexican American 8th graders who reported themselves as biliterate, English monoliterate, Spanish monoliterate, or oral bilingual. Controlling for the effects of sociodemographic background and school experience, ordinary least-square regression analysis generated supportive results. Mexican American children who identified themselves as biliterate had higher self-confidence than other groups (English or Spanish monoliterates and oral bilinguals). Logistic regression analysis found a strong interaction effect between self-identity and birthplace (United States or foreign) and parents' education. Among students born in the United States, parents' education was negatively related to biliterate identity. In contrast, parents' education was positively associated with biliterate identity among those who were foreign-born.

The language and literacy skills of 21 children (aged 6;6), who were selected for linguistic precocity at age 1;8, are reported here. Verbal abilities remained high, and in contrast to the findings at 4;6 (reported in Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992), reading achievement is now at a superior level. Overall, the results are consistent with a two-phase model of reading development, in which the second phase is more closely related to language ability than the first. Phonological awareness, as indexed by a phoneme deletion task, appears to emerge as a consequence, rather than a cause, of early reading. There also appears to be a complex relationship among early interest in reading, instruction, and reading development. Differences in child interest in books and book reading may evoke variation in literacy-relevant experiences.

Native speakers of Mandarin who learn English as a second language (L2) frequently misidentify unreleased tokens of /t/ and /d/ in the final position of English words. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two training methods that might be used to increase Mandarin adults’ accuracy in identifying such stops. Subjects were assigned to receive training using a two-alternative forced-choice procedure or a categorical same/different discrimination procedure. Small but significant increases in the percentage of correct identifications of /t/ and /d/ tokens were obtained for both groups of native Mandarin subjects, although their gains did not differ significantly. These gains were still evident for both groups 2 months after completing the training. The effect of training for both groups generalized to words that were not used in training. Contrary to the hypothesis that identification training promotes more robust long-term memory representations than same/different training, the magnitude of generalization observed for the two groups did not differ significantly. However, subjects seemed to maintain the effects of the same/different training better than the effects of the identification training. Taken together, the results obtained here challenge the view that identification training is superior to same/different training as a means for training novel phonetic contrasts.

Does bilingualism facilitate the development of cognitive abilities, and if so, how? According to the level of bilingualism hypothesis (Diaz, 1983), only in the early stages of second language acquisition does bilingualism foster cognitive ability. This hypothesis was tested on a sample of 3rd and 4th grade Mexican Spanish-English bilinguals with low English proficiency. Knowledge of Spanish and English in phonology, vocabulary, and syntax was measured. Nonverbal general intelligence was assessed with the Raven Colored Progressive Matrices, and verbal intelligence was assessed with a subtest of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery. No relationship was found between degree of bilingualism and nonverbal intelligence, contrary to the level of bilingualism hypothesis. The results suggest that the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development are not solely dependent on the level of second language proficiency.

The segmentation strategies used by native and non-native listeners of French were examined in two phoneme-monitoring experiments which required the subjects to detect the presence of word-initial /t/ in potential liaison phrases (e.g., excellent tableau/excellent acteur) and in non-liaison phrases (e.g., vrai tableau/vrai acteur). The essentially faultless performance of the natives suggested that the optimal segmentation routine in such phrases is primarily based on the identification of the critical word and, to a lesser extent, on the contextual information, which was more efficiently used to check the outcome of word recognition. In contrast, non-natives tended to rely on guessing strategies, not based on contextual information (contrary to the widely held language teaching recommendation), but on an incomplete acoustic–phonetic/lexical analysis of the signal.

The purpose of this study was to test how information-processing load affects the writing process (through thinking-aloud reports) and the story written. Information-processing load was increased by having subjects write to an ending sentence with more content constraints. Secondary reaction times were synchronized with thinking-aloud statements to yield a measure of cognitive effort for the components of the writing process and for the overall task. A high information-processing load led to lower rated story coherence, but not to lower rated quality. A high load did not increase overall cognitive effort, but changed the distribution of processing time, with more reviewing earlier. Results suggest that a high information-processing load altered the distribution of writing processes, which resulted in lower story coherence.

The present investigation explores the hypothesis that lexical information influences performance on nonword repetition tasks. The subjects – 30 normally achieving, school-aged boys – repeated multisyllabic nonword pairs, constructed to vary only in the lexicality of their constituent stressed syllables. Nonwords with stressed syllables corresponding to real words were repeated significantly more accurately than nonwords with non-lexical stressed syllables; stressed syllable lexicality primarily influenced repetition of the remaining unstressed syllables. Subsequent analyses revealed that the overwhelming majority of repetition errors operated to transform non-lexical sequences into real words, even when doing so violated both strong acoustic cues and articulatory ease. We conclude that lexical long-term memory information intrudes on nonword repetition performance, including stimuli that are within the limits of immediate memory span. These results suggest a number of caveats concerning the construction and interpretation of nonword repetition tasks and raise questions about the role of such tasks in assessing phonological working memory.

This study examines maternal talk about events in which persons or objects are hidden, missing, or absent, and the relationship of maternal language to the child's acquisition of words for disappearance. Twelve mother-child pairs were videotaped in the home during play when the children were 12, 15, and 18 months of age. The mothers kept a diary of the children 's words. Maternal language was coded during four types of disappearance events: peekaboo, hidden object games, missing objects, and absent entities. Children who had acquired gone and similar terms experienced more disappearance events and heard more maternal talk about disappearance than children who had not acquired a word for disappearance.

Most research on dyslexia deals with native speakers of English. This study, however, investigates the specific symptoms of acquired surface dyslexia in Hebrew. It is assumed that Hebrew has a number of distinctive properties that would affect the definition of symptoms differently from those in English. In this study, four acquired surface dyslexic adults were compared with eight normal second graders in terms of reading strategy. The comparison was carried out mainly to discover whether certain symptoms were specific to surface dyslexia or whether they were normal in reading acquisition and thus could be defined in terms of a general non-lexical strategy of reading. Two main conclusions emerged from this research study. (1) Homophones and homographs were a major source of difficulty for native Hebrew surface dyslexic readers; vowel misreadings were the most common error. These phenomena were not common to English surface dyslexia, where difficulty with irregular words is the main symptom and regularization errors are the most frequent. It should be noted, however, that difficulty with homophones also occurs in English surface dyslexia. (2) The normal second graders tended to read using a non-lexical strategy. Their reading was similar to that of surface dyslexic subjects.