Children who have normal language development are aware of the distinction between closed-class and open-class words at a very early age. In order to test to what extent children know the closed class to be, in fact, closed, 104 children aged 3 to 5 years participated in a sentence repetition task. Each sentence contained a nonsense word that fulfilled either an open-class or a closed-class function. Children were more likely to repeat sentences correctly when the nonsense words functioned in open-class, rather than in closed-class, contexts. In addition, older children correctly repeated more sentences containing nonsense words that functioned in closed-class contexts than younger children. This last result shows a mechanism by which children may acquire new closed-class words. The theoretical implications of the results are also discussed relative to children with specific language impairments, especially in terms of their reliance on semantic value in word acquisition.

The present study investigates the real-time costs of sentence processing in early Spanish–English bilinguals. Our results indicate that bilinguals use an amalgam (a combination of L1 and L2 strategies) of monolingual strategies in choosing the agent of a sentence. The reaction time (RT) data, however, reveal a slightly larger language specific component than the choice data. That is, bilinguals appear to fall more “in between” the two monolingual groups in their choice profiles than in their RT profiles. This implies that early bilinguals may be paying a language-specific processing cost in order to maintain an “in between” profile. The nature of the bilingual/monolingual dichotomy and its implications for the study of bilingual language processing are discussed.

Since the publication of Nelson's (1973) monograph, a number of studies have documented negative relationships between referential style and some form of maternal directiveness. However, the precise nature of these relationships is still far from clear. The present study represents an attempt to resolve this confusion by investigating the relationship between different measures of maternal directiveness and different measures of referential style in the same group of eight mother–infant dyads. A distinction is made, first, between attentional directiveness and behavioral directiveness, and, second, between referential vocabulary measures based on a fixed number of vocabulary items (i.e., 50 words) and measures taken at particular age points (in this case, 1;4). Correlational analysis of these different measures shows not only that attentional and behavioral directiveness are not significantly related, but also that they are differentially predictive of different measures of referential style. Attentional directiveness is significantly related to referential style at 1;4, but not to referential style at 50 words; behavioral directiveness is significantly related to referential style in the child's subsequent 50 words, but not to referential style at 1;4. These findings suggest that, although the attentional regulation hypothesis may be potentially useful in explaining differences in children's actual rate of vocabulary development, it may be less valuable as a means of explaining stylistic variation in early vocabulary composition. This conclusion underlines the need to distinguish relationships between mothers' interactional behavior and stylistic variation in their children's early language from more general effects of maternal behavior on children's overall rate of language development.

A major purpose of this article is to examine first language (L1) reading theories from second language (L2) perspectives and, in so doing, to uncover significant research voids related to L2 problems. The article first considers the unique aspects of L2 reading in order to identify dimensions in which its theory must differ from accepted L1 constructs. It then discusses three fundamental distinctions that separate L1 and L2 reading: (a) the consequences of prior reading experience; (b) the effects of crosslinguistic processing; and (c) the compensatory devices stemming from the efforts of learners with limited linguistic knowledge to solve comprehension problems. Finally, several pedagogically oriented research themes which may be helpful in evaluating the instructional utility of current L2 reading theories are delineated.

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of English articles by three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tongue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of children's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that the Chinese children's acquisition of the definite article differed from- what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with English as first language learners and second language learning children of other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-holding phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indefinite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition pattern already reported for children learning English as a first language or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holding, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specific second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived from a universal referential strategy for learning articles.

Personal event narratives and fictional stories are narrative genres which emerge early and undergo further development throughout the preschool and early elementary school years. This study compares personal event and fictional narratives across two language-ability groups using episodic analysis. Thirty-six normal children (aged 4 to 8 years) were divided into high and low language-ability groups using Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS). Three fictional stories and three personal event narratives were gathered from each subject and were scored for length in communication units, total types of structures found within the narrative, and structure of the whole narrative. Narrative genre differences significantly influenced narrative structure for both language-ability groups and narrative length for the high language-ability group. Personal events were told with more reactive sequences and complete episodes than fictional stories, while fictional stories were told with more action sequences and multiple-episode structures. Compared to the episodic story structure of fictional stories, where a prototypical ‘good” story is a multiple-episode structure, a reactive sequence and/or a single complete episode structure may be an alternate, involving mature narrative forms for relating personal events. These findings suggest that narrative structures for personal event narratives and fictional stories may follow different developmental paths. Finally, differences in productive language abilities contributed to the distinctions in narrative structure between fictional stories and personal event narratives. As compared to children in the low group, children in the high group told narratives with greater numbers of complete and multiple episodes, and their fictional stories were longer than their personal event narratives.

Weinreich (1953) distinguished three types of bilingualism: the compound, the coordinate, and the subordinative. In this article, we use his partition to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. In order to do so, two relatively closely related varieties were used, standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht. Subjects had to carry out an auditory lexical decision task using the repetition priming paradigm. Stimuli under investigation were cognates and noncognates. There were two age groups (13 and 17 years old) and two language backgrounds (standard Dutch and Maastricht dialect). The results indicated no differences depending on age. With regard to language background, no interlingual repetition priming was found for the dialect speakers. However, in contrast with earlier findings on visual repetition priming, there were interlingual repetition effects not only for the cognates, but also for the noncognates when the standard speakers were concerned. Therefore, we concluded that, at least in the auditory modality, the dialect speakers in question are coordinate bilinguals and the standard speakers are subordinative bilinguals. Finally, it is shown that Weinreich's model in his pure form leads to unexplainable processes in language acquisition. For that reason, his distinctions are incorporated into the lexico-semantic model of Levelt (1989).

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students’ ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that words ending in -ty in English often have a Spanish cognate ending in -dad). A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students’ ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and English. There was also marked growth in the students’ knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes. Students recognized cognate stems of suffixed words more easily than noncognate stems, suggesting that, in closely related languages such as Spanish and English, cross-language transfer may play a role, not just in recognizing individual words, but also in the learning of derivational morphology.

Phonological working memory and auditory processing skills were investigated in a group of language-disordered children with central auditory processing (CAP) difficulties. Comparisons were made with two groups of control children, one group matched on chronological age and nonverbal intelligence and the other matched on language age. The CAP disordered children showed poorer abilities in nonword repetition and word recall. In agreement with earlier findings in language-disordered children (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990), the CAP disordered children were sensitive to the phonological similarity and word length of the recall lists. However, contrary to earlier findings, the CAP disordered children in the present study also showed poorer phoneme discrimination skills. These findings may be inconsistent with the notion of one central deficit (poor phonological working memory) in CAP disordered children with a language deficit.

This study examined the comprehension of English conventional indirect requests by native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Subjects read stories inducing either a conventional or a literal interpretation of a priming sentence. Reading speeds did not vary as a function of the interpretation. Subsequent target sentences that paraphrased either the literal or the conventional interpretation of the prime sentence were read more quickly when they paraphrased a conventional interpretation of the sentence than when they paraphrased a literal interpretation. Target sentences were also read more quickly if they paraphrased the interpretation induced by the context than if they did not match. The results suggest that both native and nonnative speakers process both meanings of an ambiguous conventional request.

This article describes the development, use, and initial evaluation of a prototype computer system to enable nonspeaking persons with severe disabilities to engage in conversation on broad topics. The conversational aid produced (via a voice synthesizer) speech acts that were selected from a prestored menu, which was constructed by the user. Features of the system included facilities for switching the conversational perspective between the speaker and listener (i.e., “your experiences and views” vs. “my experiences and views”), providing a range of comments on what the other speaker had said, effecting repair when there was a conversational breakdown, and following predicted sequences of speech acts. The initial trials of the system produced dialogues that proceeded in a natural way and achieved encouraging conversational rates.

Name agreement in Spanish and English in response to 264 pictures was assessed in monolinguals and in bilinguals, who varied in rated skill in the two languages. Most of the pictures were adapted from a standardized set of line drawings of common objects (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980). Name agreement decreased as language skill decreased, and agreement was lower when labels were given in Spanish rather than in English. The relationship between name agreement and word frequency, word length, and (in the case of English) age of acquisition was assessed; both word frequency and word length were found to be related to agreement. Modal responses given by monolingual subjects were nearly identical in the two languages, and the types of non-modal responses were affected by both naming language and language skill.

Two aphasics with a similar level of phonological production difficulty are compared to distinguish the properties of disruption to two stages in the phonological system for producing single words: activation of stored lexical-phonological representations versus construction of phonemic representations. A set of distinguishing behavioral features for breakdown at each stage is generated on the basis of a model of single word production. Important variables for analyzing output include: (a) the unit of phonological encoding (morpheme versus syllable), (b) the phonemic relationship between targets and responses, (c) the effects of target consonant-vowel (CV) structure, and (d) the level of pseudoword production. On a set of production tests, the expected behavioral pattern for impaired lexical-phonological activation was displayed by LW, while the expected behavioral pattern for impaired phonemic planning was displayed by CM.

This research examines the influence of bilingualism on third language learning in a bilingual community, the Basque Country. The English-language achievement of students instructed through the majority (Spanish) and the minority (Basque) languages in the Basque Country was measured. In addition, other cognitive, sociostructural, social psychological, and educational variables were also included in the study. Several sets of regression analyses were carried out to analyze the role of bilingual education. The results indicated that bilingualism and several other variables (intelligence, motivation, age, and exposure) were good predictors of English-language achievement. This research suggests, then, that immersion in the minority language for Spanish-speaking students and school reinforcement of the native language for Basque-speaking students have positive linguistic outcomes.

Recent models of antonymy differ over the involvement of associative and conceptual connections in the representation of direct and indirect antonyms. To assess these models, subjects were presented with two sequential adjectives. In the first study they made relatedness judgments, and in the second study they made antonym and synonym judgments. Conceptual processes were manipulated by varying semantic distance, and associative processes were manipulated by varying lexical markedness. Judgments were fastest for direct antonyms, even when compared to synonyms of similar relatedness. Although judgments for synonyms were faster than for indirect antonyms, semantic distance and markedness had similar effects on these word classes. These results suggest that direct antonymy may utilize associative connections, but that indirect antonymy, like synonymy, relies primarily on conceptual connections.

Speech samples from twelve 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) were analyzed. The feature deficit hypothesis maintains that SLI children may produce morphological markers (e.g., plural -s) correctly, but they do not appreciate their role in marking grammatical features. Rather, they treat them as meaningless phonological variants. Findings from the present study were incompatible with this hypothesis: (a) production of morphological markers was not random; errors were unidirectional, in almost all cases involving omission of an inflection in an obligatory context; (b) overregularization errors were sometimes observed; (c) grammatical features differed in difficulty; (d) substitution of stems for inflected forms occurred with irregular as well as regular verbs; and (e) errors of pronoun case marking were common and always involved producing an accusative form in a context demanding the nominative. Children who used a specific inflectional form correctly in some utterances omitted it in others, suggesting a limitation of performance rather than competence. There were few obvious differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms, though there was a trend for grammatical errors to occur on words that occurred later in an utterance. It is suggested that slowed processing in a limited capacity system that is handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of grammatical morphemes.

This research investigates the independent and interactive effects of contextual and definitional information on vocabulary learning. German students of English received either a text with unfamiliar English words or their monolingual English dictionary entries. A third group of subjects were given both text and dictionary entries. Subjects used each target word in an English sentence and then translated their sentences into German. The translations showed whether students had understood the meaning of a target word and permitted the specification of comprehension strategies. Subjects who had received text and dictionary entries tended to favor the dictionary and thus performed no better than students in the other experimental groups. Subjects learning words from context replaced unfamiliar words with familiar words conforming to contextual constraints. Subjects in the dictionary group commonly substituted a relevant part of the definition for the headword. Lexical errors occurred for different reasons: substitutions in the dictionary condition were unconstrained by context; substitutions in the text condition were not sufficiently constrained by context. The study shows that information about the contexts in which words are used is crucial for acquiring an adequate understanding of word meanings.1

The relationship of gesticulation to speech has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention from investigators interested in the verbal status of gesture, its use in prelinguistic children, and the role of gestures in social and pragmatic communication. The relationship of gesticulation to sign language, in contrast, has received less attention. Although the gestures of deaf children have been investigated in the contexts of language acquisition and linguistic flexibility, the functions of gestures used by deaf versus hearing individuals have not been examined. One difficulty for such a study stems from the fact that gesture and sign language occur in the same modality. Gesture and sign are considered here with an eye toward determining those aspects of manual communication that are specific to users of signed languages and those in common with users of oral languages. This examination reveals that gestures produced by deaf individuals can be distinguished from the sign language in which they are embedded, both in terms of their privilege of occurrence and their semantic and pragmatic functions.

Three studies were performed to explore the role of letter names in children's learning of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. Some preschoolers and kindergartners were found to spell initial /w/ as y. They made this error because the name of y, /wai/, begins with /w/. Kindergartners in another study often said that y makes the sound /wdoubt/, even after they had been taught otherwise. Other results suggested that children benefit from letter-name knowledge to spell phonemes such as /b/, which occur at the beginning of a consonant-vowel letter name. Letter-name knowledge is less helpful for phonemes such as /1/, which occur at the end of a vowel-consonant letter name. Our findings suggest that children use their knowledge of letter names and their phonological segmentation skills when they learn the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. They do not memorize these links in a rote, paired-associate manner.

Since the publication of Nelson's (1973) monograph, several studies have reported significant correlations between variation in children's early vocabulary composition and differences in the functional characteristics of mothers' child-directed speech. However, it is still not clear how these relations are actually mediated. The present study attempts to investigate thís issue by differentiating and testing two alternative explanations of the relations found in previous research on data from a study of eight mother–infant dyads between 0;11 and 1;8. Despite replicating previous findings of a relation between maternal descriptiveness and the proportion of nouns and maternal directiveness and the proportion of verbs in children's early vocabularies, the results reveal no relation between differences in mothers' interactional behavior and differences in the functional characteristics of their children's spontaneous speech. On the other hand, specific relations were found between children's referential vocabularies and maternal descriptives that included nouns and between children's verb vocabularies and maternal directives that included verbs. These findings not only raise doubts about the validity of a functional similarity account of relations between maternal speech characteristics and variation in early vocabulary composition, but also suggest that they may be better understood in terms of the interaction between processing mechanisms that are common to all children and differences in the structure of the input to which different children are actually exposed.