This is an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, concepts about print, and family literacy experiences in 3-year-old children who vary in their socioeconomic backgrounds. Forty-three normally developing children, whose family incomes ranged from under $10,000 to over $100,000, were given 4 tests of language development; 12 metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and structural awareness; and 2 measures of literacy knowledge. The children's family literacy experiences were described following a parent interview. The data analysis had two main purposes. The first was to examine the family literacy experiences of the children using a qualitative analysis. The second was to describe, in a quantitative way, the relationships among family literacy experiences, socioeconomic factors, language development, metalinguistic performance, and concepts about print. The interview data revealed that, while parents varied in the emphasis they placed on literacy activities, all of the children were at least somewhat involved in literacy activities at home; family report of literacy activities was associated with family income. Quantitative analyses revealed that amount of family literacy involvement and the children's race were related to oral language development, and language development was the most powerful predictor of metalinguistic awareness. When language development was controlled statistically, family literacy and socioeconomic factors had negligible effects on metalinguistic skills; however, knowledge of print concepts was related to metalinguistic performance, especially in the phonological domain, and was associated with the children's family literacy experiences, maternal education, and race.

Studies of sentence comprehension in different languages have enhanced our understanding of how syntactic and semantic information are used in interpreting sentences. However, few studies have attempted to assess how such information affects sentence-processing speed. The present study explored effects of case inflections, gender agreement, noun animacy, and word position on decisions and reaction times for, agent-object assignment in Croatian, a case-marking language with a rich grammatical morphological system. In accordance with Bates and MacWhinney's Competition Model, results provided evidence that the various cues to agent-object relations converge and compete to affect not only agent-object decisions, but also the speed with which those decisions are made. However, several findings from the present study did not support predictions made by the Competition Model. For example, cue strength (i.e., the relative weights that listeners assign to cues) was not a good predictor of reaction time for agent-object assignment in the present study. In addition, reaction times were not always shortened by converging information or inhibited by competing information – both of which were predicted by the model. Rather, our results support the view that, in a given language, there may be constraints on the particular combinations of cues which may converge to facilitate, or compete to inhibit, agent-object assignment. The pattern of cue interactions, which was obtained for the response latencies of normal adults in the present study, is similar to that revealed by off-line choice data from a group of Croatian aphasics (Smith & Bates, 1987), another situation in which ceiling effects of the dominant case cue were removed; thus, these results may tap into a basic aspect of the human sentence processor.