The purpose of this study was to evaluate children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their proficiency with the use of prepositions. Ten children with SLI were compared to 10 younger, normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance and 10 children matched for age. Each child was asked to produce 24 sentences containing locative (in, on) and dative (to) prepositions. Responses were coded for omission or word selection errors for the target prepositions. It was hypothesized that children with SLI would make more errors than the typically developing children. Omission errors would support a difficulty with syntax because of the role prepositions play in case marking. Word selection errors would support a deficit in the area of semantics. The results confirmed that children with SLI made more errors than the control group. The children with SLI made more errors in the selection of dative prepositions, indicating a difficulty linking the semantics of prepositions and verbs.

Because the Japanese phonetic script (i.e., kana) represents moraic units, it is often claimed that Japanese people assemble phonology at the moraic unit. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the unit for naming visually presented stimuli, focusing on the special nasals /N/, geminates /Q/, long vowels /R/, and dual vowels /J/. The special sounds create two morae when there is only one syllable. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the production of three-mora, three-syllable and three-mora, two-syllable real, and nonsense words. The findings indicated that native Japanese speakers named the three-mora words containing the special sounds more quickly. Accordingly, it is posited that special sounds are named as syllable units rather than moraic units.

This study investigated the phonological awareness of low-income Spanish–English bilingual children, because phonological awareness has been found to be an important prerequisite for literacy acquisition and because such children have been identified as at risk for successful literacy acquisition. Our sample included 123 Spanish–English bilingual preschool children (M=49.1 months) attending Head Start programs. Children's receptive vocabulary was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—3rd Edition and the Test de Vocabulario en Imagines Peabody. We assessed phonological awareness using English and Spanish versions of the Early Phonological Awareness Profile, which includes deletion detection and rhyming tasks. Emergent literacy was assessed in the child's stronger language using the Emergent Literacy Profile, which includes tests of environmental print knowledge, printed word awareness, alphabet knowledge, and early writing. Spring levels of phonological awareness in each language were most strongly related to development of phonological awareness in the other language. Final models accounted for 68% of the variance in spring English and Spanish phonological awareness. Educational implications are discussed.

This study examines the speech of older adults with and without probable Alzheimer disease (PAD) when they produce sentences that include a verb and two nouns provided by the experimenter. Compared to healthy controls, individuals with mild PAD produced fewer correct responses as well as anomalous proportions of active and passive sentences. Responses were particularly impaired when canonical sentence structures had to be suppressed and unusual sentence structures generated. The sentence production accuracy of individuals with PAD correlated strongly with performance on a picture-naming task. The findings support a theory in which the ability to fully activate semantic representations is impaired in PAD, resulting in proportional impairments on single-word and sentence production tasks.

Fifteen children with specific language impairment (SLI) were matched in gender, age, and nonverbal mental age to one comparison group and in gender and standardized expressive language age to another comparison group. Their spontaneous speech was recorded while they narrated a cartoon and described their classroom. No group differences were found in mean length of utterance in morphemes or in syntactic complexity. SLI children had a lower percentage of correct irregular past tense forms but were equivalent to controls on regular past tense forms and noun plurals. Lexical diversity in terms of the number of different verbs expressed in the past tense and the number of different nouns pluralized did not differ. Some problems in generating complex sentences were found in the speech of SLI children. The importance of task constraints is stressed in explaining the discrepant performance of SLI children on spontaneous versus standardized measures of language, as well as the contribution of auditory memory limitations.Editor's Note: This article was reviewed and accepted by the previous Editor in Chief, Dr. John Locke.

We explored production and comprehension of complex sentences constructed using a limited vocabulary on a graphic symbol display with voice output by 25 adults who use augmentative and alternative communication. When asked to construct subject (SS) and object (OS) relative clause sentences, only a minority of participants encoded SS and OS relative clause sentences using different word orders. When asked to interpret graphic symbol utterances, most participants chose an SS interpretation. Thus, the word order used most frequently in production appeared to have a single preferred interpretation. The relationship between the word orders produced in graphic symbol utterances and the way the same word orders are interpreted is not necessarily straightforward.

Lexical retrieval is an essential subprocess in language production, and its efficiency is crucial for writing. To improve writing quality in a second language, we developed an experimental, computerized training for improving fluency of lexical retrieval in a classroom setting, applying techniques previously restricted to laboratory use. In a counterbalanced design with randomized assignment, each of two groups was trained on a different set of words for productive use. A previous study showed that students in both groups attained greater fluency of lexical retrieval on the trained word set in comparison to students who were not trained on that word set. The current study provides evidence that this enhanced fluency transferred to narrative writing, as students in both groups used the trained words more often in narrative texts. In addition, one of the groups showed significant improvement in their expression of essential content elements. However, no significant differences were found on global quality ratings. The results are discussed in the context of theories of limited processing capacity during text production. We also consider the implications of these results for language instruction.

Children often listen to speech in noisy environments, where they must use prior knowledge to help them interpret the intended signal. The present experiment compares school-aged children's and adults' use of one such form of prior knowledge, as demonstrated in the perceptual restoration effect. Children, like adults, perform better when speech is intermittently replaced with noise than when it is replaced with silence, suggesting that children are able to make use of prior knowledge to help them restore interrupted signals. Despite this fact, children appear to be more affected by acoustic signal disruptions than are adult listeners, suggesting they will experience greater difficulty in noisy environments.

This study tests the claim that children acquire collections of phonologically similar word forms, namely, dense neighborhoods. Age of acquisition (AoA) norms were obtained from two databases: parent report of infant and toddler production and adult self-ratings of AoA. Neighborhood density, word frequency, word length, Density×Frequency and Density×Length were analyzed as potential predictors of AoA using linear regression. Early acquired words were higher in density, higher in word frequency, and shorter in length than late acquired words. Significant interactions provided evidence that the lexical factors predicting AoA varied, depending on the type of word being learned. The implication of these findings for lexical acquisition and language learning are discussed.

Three input variables were manipulated during a story-viewing task to examine the word learning abilities of children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). The variables were presentation rate, sentence complexity, and word type. Fifty-four children participated: 18 were identified as SLI and 36 served as normally developing age-matched or language-matched controls. The stimuli involved a videotaped reading of two stories that had novel words embedded in the narrative, and word learning was measured by examining the children's ability to infer the meanings of the novel words from the story viewing context. A picture pointing task and a real word synonym task served as comprehension probes. A nonword repetition task and a battery of language tests were also administered. Two of the three input manipulations affected the children's scores. Across both probes, word type resulted in a main effect, with children from all three groups earning higher scores for verbs than nouns. On the picture pointing probe, presentation rate interacted with group. The interaction reflected lower scores in the fast rate than the slow rate for the children with SLI but not for the controls. Children's nonword repetition scores and standardized tests of vocabulary and syntax were moderately correlated with each other, and together these variables accounted for significant variation in the children's story viewing scores even after age, IQ, and articulation ability were controlled. The vocabulary and syntax tests contributed unique variance whereas nonword repetition contributed shared variance.

The study examined the impact of the phonemic and lexical distance between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and a spoken Arabic vernacular (SAV) on phonological analysis among kindergarten (N=24) and first grade (N=42) native Arabic-speaking children. We tested the effect of the lexical status of the word (SAV, MSA, and pseudoword), as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme (SAV vs. MSA), on initial and final phoneme isolation. Results showed that, when words were composed of SAV phonemes only, the lexical status of the word did not affect phoneme isolation. However, when MSA and pseudowords encoded both SAV and MSA phonemes, kindergarteners found MSA words significantly more difficult to analyze. Comparing children's ability to isolate SAV versus MSA phonemes revealed that all children found MSA phonemes significantly more difficult to isolate. Kindergarteners found MSA phonemes that were embedded within MSA words even more difficult to isolate. Results underscore the role of the lexical status of the stimulus word, as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme in phonological analysis in a diglossic context.

The primary aim of this study was to account for the finding that late bilinguals produce longer English sentences than early bilinguals. In Experiment 1, Italians who immigrated to Canada either between the age of 2–13 years (“early bilinguals”) or 15–28 years (“late bilinguals”) repeated matched English and Italian sentences following an aural model. The early bilinguals produced shorter English than Italian sentences, whereas the late bilinguals showed the opposite pattern. The same countervailing pattern was evident in Experiment 2, where bilinguals shortened sentences by 20% when instructed to repeat sentences as rapidly as possible. Subgroups of bilinguals who reported using Italian often M=46% Italian use) but not seldom (M=8%) were found to have produced significantly longer English sentences than native English (NE) speakers did. The results were interpreted to mean that the late bilinguals produced longer English sentences than the early bilinguals because they needed to expend more resources to suppress their Italian subsystem than the early bilinguals. The perceptual effect of sentence duration was evaluated in Experiment 3, where pairs of English sentences differing in duration were presented to NE-speaking listeners for foreign accent ratings. A 10% shortening caused sentences spoken by late bilinguals to sound less foreign accented but it caused sentences spoken by early bilinguals to sound more foreign accented.

The growth and predictive relations of early vocabulary and inflectional morphology were examined in children with (N=107) and without (N=93) familial risk for dyslexia. Children's receptive and expressive vocabulary and inflectional morphological skills were assessed longitudinally at 2, 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years by using a parent report tool (the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory), measures from a spontaneous speech sample, and standardized tests. Children with and without familial risk for dyslexia did not differ from each other, either in expressive vocabulary or in composite scores of inflectional morphology at the age of 2 years. However, language skills indicated increasing group differences with age. Inflectional morphology showed differing predictive patterns for the at-risk group and their controls. Proficiency of inflections at 2 years significantly predicted 5-year-olds' language skills in the at-risk group. In contrast, for their age-matched controls inflections were not a significant predictor until the age of 3.5 years. Our findings suggest that children from families with dyslexia risk status and low inflectional skills at an early age are at higher risk for impairments in subsequent language development than are their age-matched controls.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are a useful first language (L1) comparison group for second language (L2) children in order to determine whether target-deviant structures in interlanguage are developmental or due to transfer from the L1. Children with SLI could make a useful comparison group for child L2 learners because, unlike very young L1 learners, children with SLI have both incomplete abilities in the target language and the same cognitive and mental maturity as their age mates acquiring an L2. We examined the use of direct object clitics by English-L1/French-L2 learners and monolingual French-speaking children with SLI. Transfer from English might be expected for object pronominalization in French L2 interlanguage because the two languages have contrastive systems for this aspect of grammar. The use of direct object clitics in contexts in spontaneous speech where object pronominalization would be permissible was examined. The results showed that both the L2 and SLI children supplied clitics in permissible contexts at the same rate (approximately 40%), which was lower than that of monolingual, normally developing French-speaking children who were either age-matched (7 years old) or language-matched according to mean length of utterance in words (3 years old) with the L2–SLI children. Although there appeared to be some role of L1 transfer in the relative distribution of nonclitic object types in clitic-permissible contexts, the similarities between the SLI and L2 children suggest that target-deviant structures involving direct object pronominalization are a developmental phenomenon in child French across learner contexts. The results also suggest that for acquisition of some target-deviant structures, there can be greater similarities between L2 and SLI children than between L2 and younger L1 children.

Given the morphophonemic nature of the English orthography, surprisingly few studies have examined the roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading. This 4-year longitudinal study (Grades 2–5) compared these two factors in three aspects of reading development: pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and single word reading. Morphological awareness contributed significantly to pseudoword reading and reading comprehension, after controlling prior measures of reading ability, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and phonological awareness. This contribution was comparable to that of phonological awareness and remained 3 years after morphological awareness was assessed. In contrast, morphological awareness rarely contributed significantly to single word reading. We argue that these results provide evidence that morphological awareness has a wide-ranging role in reading development, one that extends beyond phonological awareness.

The role of articulation quality in the development of phonological sensitivity was examined in a 5-year longitudinal study. A sample of 80 children was assessed at age 3. They were assessed yearly to age 6. Forty-three of the original sample were traced and reassessed at age 8. As predicted, the results revealed that articulation quality of the phoneme /r/ predicted phoneme sensitivity for the phoneme /r/ at ages 3–5 after controlling for vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phoneme sensitivity for a control phoneme. Later analyses showed that articulation quality at age 3 explained unique variance in phoneme sensitivity and decoding at age 8, after entering appropriate control variables. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that weakened phonological representations for specific phonemes linger after articulation has normalized.

We introduce an objective method for classifying phonological overlap between Spanish and English translation equivalents. This method then is exploited to examine spoken word recognition using stimuli with graded levels of phonological overlap. Performance by typical English-only speaking (EO) children and English-only children with primary language impairment (LI) is compared to a control group of bilingual Spanish–English peers (BI). Response time and accuracy separated groups, with the BI group outperforming the EO group, who in turn outperformed the LI group. Children with more severe LI are slower than those with mild LI, and LI severity is significantly correlated with speed. The two groups of monolingual children and the LI subgroups respond in a qualitatively similar way to decreasing phonological overlap.

Research on children's spelling has focused on its phonological bases. In the present study, we examined a type of nonphonological knowledge that even young children may possess—knowledge about the distinction between upper- and lowercase letters. In Study 1, we analyzed the capitalization patterns used by children in kindergarten through second grade on words that did not contain a capital letter in their conventional spellings. The younger children, especially, often wrote with capital letters. They did so in a nonrandom way, being more likely to capitalize word-initial letters than later letters. When children inserted an uppercase letter in a noninitial position of a spelling, it tended to be a letter whose uppercase form was especially familiar to the child, the initial letter of the child's first name. In Study 2, which examined kindergartners' knowledge of the names of upper- and lowercase letters, we found further evidence that children's names influence their knowledge about letters and that some of this knowledge is case specific. Together, the results show that early spelling involves more than phonology.

This study investigates the acquisition and on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in second language (L2) Spanish by English-speaking learners. It asks whether L2 learners make a syntactic distinction between the two verb classes and whether there is an effect of semantic subclass, in accordance with a semantic hierarchy. Participants were 35 native Spanish speakers and 44 English-speaking learners of Spanish ranging from intermediate to advanced proficiency. The main task was an on-line visual probe recognition task. Subjects read sentences on a computer screen and had to decide whether a word had appeared in the sentence. The results of this study showed that native speakers who scan their syntactic representations to find a word contained in a complex subject noun phrase recognized the word faster with unaccusative-verb sentences than with unergative-verb sentences, suggesting that the syntactic presence of a trace in unaccusative-verb sentences facilitates comprehension. The L2 learners showed a similar response pattern, confirming that they differentiated between the two classes of verbs. Analyses of reaction times by verb class indicated that not all of the verbs in each class were responded to consistently: some subclasses induced shorter reaction times than others.

This study explores growth in Chinese children's narrative over a 9-month period. Sixteen children (eight boys, eight girls) living in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in this project. The children were visited in the home at ages 3 years 6 months (3;6), 3;9, 4;0, and 4;3 and were prompted to tell personally experienced narratives at each visit. Three dimensions of the child's narrative skills (narrative structure, evaluation, and temporality) were assessed from an individual growth modeling perspective. The results of this study suggest that Chinese children, generally speaking, include more narrative components, evaluative information, and temporal markers in their narratives over time. However, the growth patterns and rates of change for each child on each narrative measure vary.