Previous research conducted with early learning French–English bilinguals suggests that, at the individual word level, the development of segmentation is best characterized in terms of a parameter-setting theory of language acquisition in which French segmentation is marked relative to English segmentation. The present study, which is conducted with late learning French–English bilinguals, finds evidence for parameter setting but with a directionality of markedness opposite that found by others. Support in favor of these findings is discussed.

Letter names bridge the gap between oral and written language among English speaking children. This study examined whether letter names have a similar function in Hebrew. Despite their common historical source, Hebrew letter names differ from English: they are longer and not as regular phonologically. However, they follow the acrophonic principle, unlike many English letter names. Israeli kindergartners, whose mother tongue was Hebrew, were asked to orally provide initial or final letters of spoken words, to spell words in writing, and to select one written word out of two as standing for an oral word. First graders were tested on orally providing the initial letter and spelling. Children were found to rely on letter names in performing all these tasks. They succeeded more in providing the initial letter or in spelling it if the word started with a letter-name sequence, like kaftor (button), which is spelled with k (Kaf). They succeeded more in selecting the correct word between two if the words started with a letter-name sequence. In grade 1 the effects decreased and became limited particularly to phonemes spelled with homophonic letters. Partial letter names (impossible in English) affected performance but to a lesser extent than entire names. Reliance on letter names both facilitated and impaired performance but in different ways than in English. The educational implications are discussed.

The use of psychological state words during mother–child play sessions at age 3 was examined in 31 children diagnosed with delayed expressive language at 24–31 months and 21 age-matched typically developing comparison children. Children and mothers in the late talker group made more references to physiological states and fewer references to cognitive states than the children and mothers in the typically developing comparison group. The children's use of cognitive terms correlated significantly with measures of language ability, including mean length of utterance, Index of Productive Syntax score, and use of propositional complements, as well as with their mothers' use of cognitive terms. The delay in the emergence of psychological state words, particularly cognitive terms such as think and know, may affect other aspects of late talkers' cognitive and social development.

This study investigated word recognition among fluent readers of English as a second language (ESL). Specifically, the study examined whether ESL readers' first language (L1) affects the procedures underlying second language word recognition, with respect to the effects of word frequency and regularity on word recognition. The results revealed a similarity in word-recognition procedures between fluent ESL readers with various L1 backgrounds (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Persian). In processing high-frequency words, all the ESL groups recognized exception words as quickly as regular words; low-frequency exception words, on the contrary, took longer to recognize than low-frequency regular words.

Recent evidence suggests that phonological short-term memory (STM) tasks are influenced by both lexical and sublexical factors inherent in the selection and construction of the stimuli to be recalled. This study examined whether long-term memory (LTM) influences STM at a sublexical level by investigating whether the frequency with which one-syllable nonwords occur in polysyllabic words influences recall accuracy on two phonological STM tasks, nonword repetition and serial recall. The results showed that recall accuracy increases when the stimuli to be recalled consist of one-syllable nonwords that occur often in polysyllabic English words. This result is consistent with the notion that LTM facilitates phonological STM at both a lexical and sublexical level. Implications for models of verbal STM are discussed.

The beauty of edited volumes is their potential to achieve synergism in bringing together diverse work on a significant topic – not just to create a coherent collection of research. Literacy in African American communities succeeds on all fronts. In presenting a broad view of literacy-related practices, the volume evokes a variable African American community that is invisible (or at least hazy) in many schools. Without deep knowledge of the linguistic, cultural, historical, and political contexts for literacy in the community, the schools and university programs that prepare professionals cannot hope to overcome the deficit perspective of cultural and linguistic differences that still drives assessment and instruction to a large degree.

The present study examines the role of the relative transparency of Portuguese and Spanish orthographies in schoolchildren's word recognition procedures. Both Portuguese and Spanish may be considered as transparent orthographies. However, mappings at the grapheme–phoneme level are more consistent in Spanish than in Portuguese. Four groups of Portuguese and Spanish children from grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, who had been taught to read using a phonics-based approach, were given a Portuguese and a Spanish version of three different continuous reading tasks: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. Reading time per item was measured and errors noted. Improvement in reading time was observed in both orthographies from grades 1 to 4. There were no errors in numeral recognition and few children made errors in reading the number words. In pseudoword reading, the Spanish children were faster and made fewer errors than the Portuguese children. Errors in pseudoword reading were scored as phonological when leading to the production of another pseudoword and as lexical when involving refusals and/or the production of a real word. Portuguese children made more phonological errors than the Spanish group, and there was no difference in the number of lexical errors. The results are discussed in terms of the role played by the differing orthographic transparency of Spanish and Portuguese in young readers' word recognition procedures.

The real-time lexical processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined, and the focus was to determine whether a temporal processing deficit or a general processing capacity deficit disrupts these children's lexical processing. A group of SLI children (mean age 8;3), a group of age-matched children (CA, mean age 8;1), and a group of receptive syntax-matched children (RS; mean age 6;7) completed a sentence processing task in which they monitored sentences for a target word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of sentences. Sentences systematically varied with respect to containing either a high proportion of stop consonants (stop-loaded sentences) or a high proportion of nonstop consonants (nonstop-loaded sentences). Children also completed the Identification (ID) Speech Perception Task. On the sentence processing task, SLI children yielded significantly slower word recognition reaction time (RT) overall than both CA and RS controls. Sentence type had no effect on any subject group's RT. No Group × Sentence Type interaction was found. On the ID task, SLI children performed significantly worse than CA controls but similarly to RS children. No correlation was found between temporal processing and lexical processing (for either sentence type or sentences combined) for any group. The findings are interpreted to suggest that a general processing capacity limitation was responsible for the poor ID task performance and slower lexical processing of SLI children.

Communicating without speech: Practical augmentative and alternative communication is an introduction to augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for “doctors and other health professionals who may have no prior knowledge of this field.” It differs from most introductory books in AAC in that it is intended neither as a textbook in AAC (e.g., Beukelman & Mirenda, 1998; Glennen & DeCoste, 1997; Lloyd, Fuller, & Arvidson, 1997; von Tetchzner & Martinsen, 2000) nor as a guide for AAC practitioners (McCurlin & Murray, 2000).

Since the late 1980s, the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) has defined the state of the art of collection, analysis, archiving, and data sharing of transcriptions of children's language. Starting from scratch in 1987, Brian MacWhinney, along with many other leaders in child language, developed highly useful tools for the computerization of transcripts and their analysis. I have used the transcription conventions and analysis programs since 1989 and have seen the system evolve from a simple DOS-based program to one that handles much broader and more complex analyses within more user-friendly Windows and Macintosh platforms. This latest (third) edition of the manual that accompanies the CHILDES system reflects a more stable version of the Conventions for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) and Child Language Analysis (CLAN) programs than prior editions, which felt like works in progress. This version is written as a finished product with procedures and programs that have settled down into stable patterns of operation.

This book attempts to integrate symbolic processing, in the form of minimalism, with connectionism. Minimalism represents sentences as symbolic structures resulting from a formal process of syntactic derivation. Connectionism, on the other hand, represents sentences as patterns of association between linguistic features. These patterns are said to obey statistical regularities of linguistic usage instead of formal linguistic rules. The authors of the book argue that human sentence processing displays both structural and statistical characteristics and therefore requires the integration of the two views.

For more than two decades, the Children's Language series has been publishing papers from the triennial meetings of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). In this 11th volume, nine papers were selected from the 276 presentations at the seventh IASCL congress held in Istanbul, Turkey, in July 1996. Another group of seven papers, mostly on narrative development, which were presented at the same congress, were published in Volume 10 of this series by the same editors (Nelson, Aksu-Koç, & Johnson, 2001). At first glance, the title of this volume suggests that the theme that ties all the chapters together into a book is the study of children's interaction in face-to-face conversations. However, with a closer look, the reader discovers that, although some studies analyze ways in which input (either linguistic or nonlinguistic) plays a role in the emergence of language, the approach adopted in most of the chapters presupposes that no single factor can explain the processes involved in child language development. Interaction is understood as the interplay of multiple factors that combine the linguistic, cognitive, affective, or biological features on which developing abilities in the domains of grammar and the lexicon depend; this results in a broad picture of how children develop language.

This volume contains all 14 papers and three commentaries from the Recent Advances in the Generative Study of Second Language Acquisition Conference that was held in 1993 at MIT. Eleven of the papers address the acquisition of syntax. Of these, four focus on functional categories in second language (L2) acquisition. Vainikka and Young-Scholten propose that, although lexical categories or content phrases (NP, VP, AP, PP) transfer from the first language to the second, along with the headedness of those categories, functional categories or grammatical phrases (DP, IP, CP) do not. Using longitudinal data from Korean, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish learners of German, they suggest that learners begin by adopting a VP structure for the sentences in the L2 and then subsequently expand this into an underspecified finite phrase (FP), then an agreement phrase (AgrP), and finally a complementizer phrase (CP).

The highly regarded Children's Language series continues in 2001 with two new volumes, 10 and 11 (Nelson, Aksu-Koc, & Johnson, 2001, Vol. 11). Under the able leadership of Keith Nelson (who has edited all but two volumes), each volume since 1978 has represented current topics in research on child language; and the series provides a comprehensive overview of the history and progression of the study of language development over the past two and a half decades. Since Volume 7, the papers included in the series were chosen from the range of presentations at the meetings of the International Association of the Study of Child Language, which bring together researchers from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, North and South America, and Africa. Prior to Volume 7, articles in each volume also represented an international scope.

Laurence Leonard is one of the most prolific and well-respected researchers in the area of specific language impairment (SLI) in children, and he is well qualified to write a book surveying the topic. SLI is a disorder of unknown origin, which appears to have a genetic component, causing delays and disorders of language development in children of normal nonverbal intelligence with no significant medical, emotional, or sensory deficits. The primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive review of research in the field of SLI, and Leonard has the minute knowledge necessary to succeed at the task. The coverage in the book reaches back to the earliest nineteenth-century descriptions of children who fit the profile and then moves forward quickly to the massive literature that has accumulated on the topic in the last 20 years. Following the introductory historical and definitional section, Leonard goes on to describe the nature of the linguistic impairment in SLI, including important cross-linguistic accounts and nonlinguistic cognitive issues. The book also covers hypotheses of causation, in a “nature versus nurture” section, and clinical issues of assessment and intervention. Part V, on theory, may be of most interest to psycholinguists who are not language disorders specialists. Overall, there is no doubt that this book is both an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with SLI and a welcome overview and resource for experts. Leonard's knowledge is encyclopedic, his presentation erudite, and his grasp of detail unfailingly impressive.

The sociolinguistics of sign languages includes an introduction and six content chapters. In it the contributors present a clear and concise summary of many of the major areas of the study of sociolinguistics. The main purpose of the book is given in the introduction: to present linguistics students with an introductory text that covers many of the current issues and trends in the sociolinguistic study of signed languages. It also seeks to place the study of signed languages within the larger domain of general sociolinguistics. The book is quite successful with that goal in mind. A synopsis of the chapters' contents is presented below, followed by a review of the text as a whole.

In this introductory textbook to language acquisition Guasti has done an excellent job of presenting the state of the art of generative linguistic research in the field. Her review of the literature is extremely thorough and up to date; and theoretical arguments, empirical findings, and methodological issues are introduced and discussed with great rigor and lucidity.

In traditional foreign-language classrooms, students are explicitly taught grammar and vocabulary. Language learners' difficulties in conveying their messages in the target language, however, may relate to the development of interactional competence, which is achieved through interactions with peers and teachers within the classroom setting. Unfortunately, the importance of such pragmatic development is not always emphasized in traditional classrooms. To address this inadequacy, Amy Synder Ohta's new book provides an introduction to the complex process of learning a second or foreign language (L2) in a classroom setting.

In the field of linguistics, as we have repeatedly seen, some languages have had a harder time than others gaining acceptance as “legitimate” and achieving recognition as “real.” Whether it is their specific histories, politics, or cultural origins, certain categories of languages and their speakers have been labeled “different” (often interpreted as deficient) and subsequently ignored, misunderstood, and not admitted into the group of languages deemed worthy of academic study and social recognition. Those languages selected for study and validation shared many features: they had traditions of literacy and literature, dictionaries and grammars, and they were spoken.

The following Book Review was published with several typographical errors that altered the intended meaning. The entire review is reprinted here with those regrettable errors corrected.