The aim of this study was to examine, with a longitudinal study design, the effects of phonological memory and native language (NL) literacy acquisition on learning English as a foreign language (FL). The subjects were 160 Finnish school children, who were 7-year-old first graders at the beginning of the study. Measures in the first grade were NL word recognition and listening comprehension; in the second grade, word recognition, reading comprehension, and phonological memory; and in the third grade, FL skills. The main result from the structural equation modeling was that both NL literacy and phonological memory have positive effects on FL learning. These skills explained 58% of the variance in English proficiency. Therefore, proficiency in NL literacy skills is highly significant for FL learning, although the orthographic regularity varied a lot (Finnish vs. English). On the basis of the results, it can be concluded that one way to promote FL learning is by diagnosing NL literacy skills early on and by providing training in NL literacy for at-risk children. In addition, the significant role of phonological memory in FL learning suggests that training in the FL phonology may enhance competence in the foreign language.

This study investigated the developing metalinguistic capabilities of Hispanic primary school children who are becoming bilingual but whose English reading achievement is below average. Two questions were posed: first, do native- and second-language vocabulary and degree of bilingualism contribute to performance on a metalinguistic task (defining words) and, second, do native- and second-language vocabulary and metalinguistic development at the word level significantly predict reading comprehension in the spring? The results showed that performance on the definition task in English and in Spanish was significantly explained by word knowledge in the language of the task; performance on the definition task in the other language (English or Spanish) but not degree of bilingualism contributed significantly, after the effects of vocabulary in the two languages were accounted for. Both native- and second-language vocabulary and phonological awareness independently contributed to achievement in English reading comprehension. The results suggest that, for children with limited native-language development in the early stages of bilingualism, vocabulary development in both the native and second language and metalinguistic development at the word level may be important education priorities because of their effects on second-language reading comprehension.

Several scholars have claimed that childhood bilingualism may enhance development of linguistic awareness. In the present investigation, metalinguistic ability is studied in terms of the dual skill components outlined by Bialystok and Ryan (1985): control of linguistic processing and analysis of linguistic knowledge. A total of 38 English–Swedish bilinguals, assigned to two groups according to relative proficiency, and 16 Swedish monolinguals, all aged 6 to 7 years, received three tasks: symbol substitution, grammaticality judgment, and grammaticality correction. Effects of general bilingualism were found on tasks requiring a high control of linguistic processing, thus replicating previous findings. The results indicated that a high degree of bilinguality may also enhance the development of linguistic analysis. Moreover, it was found that certain metalinguistic skills – especially control of processing – were more readily applied in the subjects' weaker language.

This study examined relationships between oral language and literacy in a two-year, multivariate design. Through empirical cluster analysis of a sample of 88 kindergarten children, four oral language subtypes were identified based on measures of semantics, syntax, metalinguistics, and oral narration. Validation efforts included (a) concurrent and predictive analyses of subtype differences on reading, spelling, and listening comprehension measures based on a priori hypotheses and (b) a comparison of the teacher classification of the children with the empirical classification. The subtypes represented high average, low average, high narrative, and low overall patterns of oral language skill. The high average subtype received the most consistent evidence for validation. The pattern of validation results indicates that the relationship between oral language and literacy is not uniform and suggests a modification of the assumption that oral language skills have a direct role in reading acquisition.

This study compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. Both groups performed on-line gender assignment to real nouns whose gender was regular or exceptional, given their ending, and to invented nouns with nonword stems and real-word endings. The pattern of results indicated that the native speakers' gender attributions were primarily based on rapidly evoked lexical associations, with gender-ending correspondences playing a significant but subsidiary role. The foreign learners were less able to summon lexical associations, relying heavily on ending-based rules. Overall, none of the foreign learners attained the same level of performance as any of the native speakers. We conclude that instruction in which students learn nouns in the context of distinctive lexical associates could profitably be supplemented by explicit instruction in gender-ending regularities.

This article examines the characteristics of surface dyslexia in a language (Italian) with high grapheme–phoneme correspondence. The reading performances of four boys are reported. The most pervasive reading symptom was severe slowness, which was associated in some, but not all, cases with reduced text comprehension. All four dyslexics performed at chance level on a task requiring comprehension of homophonous words (Study I). Vocal reaction times to single words were delayed with respect to the controls and showed a clear word length effect (Study II). However, vocal reaction times to pictorial stimuli were normal (Study III). Eye movement recordings taken during reading indicated an increased number and a reduced amplitude of rightward saccades and longer fixation durations (Study IV). A test of letter recognition in central and peripheral vision indicated that the reading deficit could not be explained in terms of an abnormal attentional “window,” as found in other cases of dyslexia (Study V). An analysis of the boys' cognitive skills (Study VI) indicated spared phonological awareness in three of four subjects; a severe deficit in rapid scanning of nonlinguistic stimuli was present in all of the subjects. Overall, these results indicate that parallel visual processing of words was impaired, and that the boys analyzed words sequentially, presumably through an orthographic–phonological conversion. This condition may be interpreted as surface dyslexia, even though the prominent characteristics of this syndrome are somewhat different in Italian than in other languages. In languages with “loose” relationships between graphemes and phonemes (e.g., English), when the phonological analysis of words is insufficient, a variety of errors is produced. In languages with considerably more regular grapheme–phoneme correspondence (e.g., Italian), the number of errors may be small since phonological reading is generally correct, and the most conspicuous symptom is slowness in reading.

Longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese–English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3;5 years, are presented. The children were assessed at 4-week intervals. The first assessment of their phonology occurred when they had been exposed to English for three months. Phoneme acquisition and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two languages. The two phonological systems for each child developed in similar ways to monolingual children acquiring Cantonese and English. However, a number of error patterns, indicative of disorder in monolingual children, were evident in the children's phonological systems in English and in Cantonese. These patterns have been documented as normal error patterns for successive bilingual Cantonese–English speaking children. The difference between normal successive bilingual phonological development and normal monolingual development is addressed.

Three studies examined the sources of learning by which children, very early in learning to read, formed correspondences between letters and phonemes when these were not explicitly taught in the whole language instruction they received. There were three classes of predicted knowledge sources: (a) induced sublexical relations (i.e., induction of orthographic–phonological relations from the experience of print words), (b) acrophones from letter names, and (c) transfer from spelling experience. The results of Study 1 indicated that children used both sources (a) and (b). Study 2 results showed that source (a) dominated when the letters were initial components of pseudowords rather than isolated items. The transfer from phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences of the children's spelling was examined in Study 3. The results were not consistent with the use of source (c). The findings of these studies have implications for the question of how early in learning to read children are able to use knowledge from their experience of print words as a source for phonological recoding.

The purpose of this study was to describe the first and second language literacy levels of a sample of 222 Turkish children living in the Netherlands and to identify the factors that are related to individual variation in their literacy performance. Measures of both school literacy and functional literacy were taken in the target languages, Turkish and Dutch. Data of monolingual control groups were used as benchmarks. To explore individual variation in biliteracy scores, background characteristics originating from the child, the family, and the school were examined. The results of the study indicated that the children in the Netherlands attained lower levels of literacy than their monolingual peers. The level of biliteracy of the children in the Netherlands turned out to be primarily related to the factors of home stimulation, parents' motivation for schooling, and children's self-esteem.

The production of regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated among the members of an English-speaking family with a hereditary disorder of language. Unlike the control subjects, the family members affected by the disorder failed to generate overregularizations (e.g., digged) or novel regular forms (plammed, crived), whereas they did produce novel irregularizations (crive–crove). They showed word frequency effects for regular past tense forms (looked) and had trouble producing regulars and irregulars (looked, dug). This pattern cannot be easily explained by deficits of articulation or of perceptual processing, by previous simulations of impairments to a single-mechanism system, or by the extended optional infinitive hypothesis. We argue that the pattern is consistent with a three-level explanation. First, we posit a grammatical deficit of rules or morphological paradigms. This may be caused by a dysfunction of a frontal/basal-ganglia “procedural memory” system previously implicated in the implicit learning and use of motor and cognitive skills. Second, in contexts requiring inflection in the normal adult grammar, the affected subjects appear to retrieve word forms as a function of their accessibility and conceptual appropriateness (“conceptual selection”). Their acquisition and use of these word forms may rely on a “declarative memory” system previously implicated in the explicit learning and use of facts and events. Third, a compensatory strategy may be at work. Some family members may have explicitly learned a strategy of adding suffix-like endings to forms retrieved by conceptual selection. The morphological errors of young normal children appear to be similar to those of the affected family members, who may have been left stranded with conceptual selection by a specific developmental arrest. The same underlying deficit may also explain the impaired subjects' difficulties with derivational morphology.

Foreign language anxiety is a complex phenomenon that has been found to be a predictor of foreign language achievement. This study of 210 university students examined factors that predict1 foreign language anxiety. A setwise multiple regression analysis revealed that seven variables (i.e., age, academic achievement, prior history of visiting foreign countries, prior high school experience with foreign languages, expected overall average for current language course, perceived scholastic competence, and perceived self-worth) contributed significantly to the prediction of foreign language anxiety. An analysis of variance, which included trend analysis, revealed that freshmen and sophomores reported the lowest levels of foreign language anxiety, and that anxiety levels increased linearly as a function of year of study. The educational implications of these findings for understanding foreign language anxiety and for increasing foreign language learning are discussed, as are suggestions for future research.

The experiments presented here used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981) to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable (e.g., BA) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., BALANCE). The target was either a consonant–vowel (CV) or consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. Skilled adult readers showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets corresponded to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not), but this occurred only when the carrier words had low printed frequencies. First grade readers did not show a syllable compatibility effect when tested in February of the first year of schooling; only target length influenced detection times. When tested four months later (June), however, the children with the highest scores on a reading ability test did show a syllable compatibility effect. These results suggest that reading instruction rapidly allows syllable-sized units to be accessed from print, and that this type of coding continues to influence how adult readers process low frequency words.

Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (e.g., Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of noun endings (and other sublexical elements and morphological constituents) in marking gender, and that agreement markers can be used strategically to constrain the genders of ambiguously marked nouns. Adult native (L1) speakers of Russian (Experiment 1) and advanced nonnative (L2) speakers (Experiment 2) read Russian sentences on a computer and were asked to choose one of two inflected past tense verbs in a forced choice task. The verbs either matched or mismatched the gender of the subject NP. Half of the target trials used opaque (end-palatalized) subject nouns, which were ambiguously marked for gender, and the other half used transparent (regularly marked) subject nouns. Noun type was crossed with the presence or absence of a gender-marked adjective in the subject NP. When an adjective was present in the subject NP, both L1 and L2 speakers were significantly faster at reading and selecting the correct verb form. L2 but not L1 speakers showed longer reading and choice latencies and made more errors when the subject noun was opaque. The data showed that L2 speakers used adjective inflections to disambiguate the gender of opaque subject nouns and to select gender appropriate verb inflections. The accuracy data for L1 and L2 speakers were tested against several connectionist models. The models' success in accounting for the data suggested that L1 and L2 speakers may depend on a common learning mechanism and thus resemble one another at the computational level, contrary to traditional computational accounts (Carroll, 1989, 1995).

The present study investigated the role of phonological and orthographic processing skills in adult second language reading. The subjects were 60 ESL graduate students; all were native speakers of Farsi. Three types of ESL reading measures were used as criterion variables: reading comprehension, silent reading rate, and the ability to recognize individual words. Data were analyzed using correlational and hierarchical multiple regression. Efficiency in phonological and orthographic processing contributed significantly to individual differences on the reading measures. In particular, efficiency in orthographic processing contributed to the reading measures independently of syntactic and semantic measures. The study suggests that it is useful to consider individual differences in ESL reading with respect to individual differences in lower level processes – particularly the efficiency with which readers process phonological and orthographic information.

This article reports on an investigation of the development of literacy, bilingualism, and metalinguistic awareness. The particular context of the study (high levels of bilingualism among school-age children) and the particular language contact situation (an indigenous language) offer a vantage point on the interaction between language learning and metalinguistic awareness and take into account the sociolinguistic imbalances that characterize bilingual communities of this type. The subjects who participated in the study were speakers of Spanish and Náhuatl from Central Mexico. Assessments of metalinguistic awareness related to different aspects of the children's consciousness of the languages they spoke or understood were compared to a series of assessments of reading comprehension, writing, and oral narrative in both languages. Findings suggest directions for further research along the following lines: metalinguistic awareness is related to different aspects of literacy development in different ways, the key variables being the degree of decontextualization and expressive versus receptive language tasks.

The experiment reported here employed a word-onset gating technique to investigate the role of prosody in word recognition. Subjects were asked to identify words based on word onsets alone, word onsets followed by information about the word duration, or word onsets followed by information about full word prosody (i.e., both duration and stress). Results showed that words were correctly recognized with significantly less segmental onset information when word prosody was available to the subjects. Consistent with this finding, prerecognition error responses reflected correct length and prosody with less onset phonology when prosody information was provided in the stimulus than when only length information was provided. The findings of this experiment confirm the importance of word prosody for spoken word recognition.

The way spoken language is represented by orthographic structure is thought to influence the cognitive reading mechanism for a language, and therefore language breakdown patterns should reflect this. The present article focuses on two patients, both monolingual native Spanish speakers, who were able to read words but showed great difficulty in reading nonwords. This finding could be attributed to the fact that these patients were reading globally using a lexical route. This pattern of reading behavior is known as phonological dyslexia. It has been argued that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers since its orthography is highly regular. Our findings contradict this hypothesis and support the view that cognitive reading mechanisms are universal.

The word substitution errors from a corpus of 2,400 French slips of the tongue were grouped into several categories: contaminational, semantic, formal, and mixed cases; substitutions of syntagmatic codependents also occurred. Semantic and formal substitutions involved a resemblance between target and error. In addition, all substitutions exhibited a strong degree of word class and gender identity. The various types of resemblance were analyzed with reference to three-layer models of lexicalization. They did not make a lemma layer necessary, but stronger evidence came from another error category – semantic blends.

Reading-disabled children display a phonemic awareness deficit when compared with normally achieving children matched for word reading ability. However, previous research has not examined phonemic awareness deficits in reading-disabled children when compared with children matched on pseudoword reading. This article examines phonemic awareness ability in both a traditional design and a pseudoword reading level match design. The results show that a group of reading-disabled children who show typical pseudoword reading and phonemic awareness deficits in the traditional reading level match design nonetheless have phonemic awareness skills commensurate with their level of pseudoword reading ability.

This study examined differences between adults and children and between normal and poor readers in the use of phonemic coding strategies for storing words in working memory. In the first experiment, adults, 11-year-olds, and 8-year-olds (categorized as normal or poor readers) recalled eight-item strings of rhyming and nonrhyming words. A developmental decrease in errors was observed for adults, 11-year-olds, and normal-reading 8-year-olds that reflected an improvement in the phonemic coding of items in working memory, but no difference was found between normal- and poor-reading 8-year-olds in the use of phonemic coding strategies. A second experiment with shorter lists and more children supported the latter finding. The results were interpreted as demonstrating that the ability to access syllable-internal phonemic structure is a necessary precursor to the development of phonemic coding strategies for working memory, but that the use of that structure for storing words in working memory is a skill that develops independently and later than the ability to access phonemic structure.