Experimental studies of sentence production in Parkinson disease (PD) are rare. This study examined the relationship between cognitive abilities and performance on two sentence production tasks, sentence repetition, and sentence generation, in which complexity was manipulated. Thirty-eight older adults aged 60 to 85, half with PD, completed the two language tasks plus a cognitive battery. Participants with PD performed more poorly in the repetition task overall, especially in fluency, but differences were no longer significant once cognitive ability was controlled. In contrast, on the sentence generation task the PD group was significantly impaired on all language dimensions and overall performance. Although cognitive ability accounted for significant variance in all measures of sentence generation, the PD group remained significantly impaired when these factors were controlled. These findings suggest that, although language production is influenced by cognitive abilities, it can be significantly impaired in PD over and above the effects of differences in cognitive abilities.

We investigated phonemic competence in production in three age groups of children (7 and 8, 10 and 11, 12 and 13 years) using rhyme and phoneme monitoring. Participants were required to name target pictures silently while monitoring covert speech for the presence or absence of a rhyme or phoneme match. Performance in the verbal tasks was compared to a nonverbal control task in which participants monitored tone sequence pairs for a pattern match. Repeated-measures analysis of variance revealed significant differences between the three age groups in phoneme monitoring, whereas similar differences were limited to the younger age groups in rhyme monitoring. This finding supported early and ongoing acquisition of rhyme- and later acquisition of segment-level units. In addition, the 7- and 8-year-olds were significantly slower in monitoring phonemes within consonant clusters compared to the 10- and 11-year-olds and in monitoring both singleton phonemes and phonemes within clusters compared to the 12- and 13-year-olds. Regression analysis revealed that age accounted for approximately 30% variance in the nonverbal and 60% variance in the verbal monitoring tasks. We attribute the observed differences to the emergence of cognitive processes such as segmentation skills that are critical to performing the verbal monitoring tasks.

This study investigated narrative competence in children with pragmatic language impairment (PLI) and the extent to which it is related to impairments in theory of mind and executive functioning (EF). Narrative competence was assessed using a retelling design in a group of 77 children with PLI and a control group of 77 typically developing children, aged 5. The children with PLI showed an overall poorer narrative competence as apparent in measures of narrative productivity, organization of content, and cohesion. Some of these differences could be attributed to language impairments. The remaining differences could be partly interpreted as pragmatic deficits. In typically developing children, narrative productivity skills were related to both theory of mind and EF, but only theory of mind explained unique variance once language ability was added to the model. In the PLI group, however, narrative productivity skills were solely related to EF, over and above language abilities. Organization of story content and cohesion were not related to any of the cognitive measures for either group. The results indicate that children with PLI show narrative deficits and that these deficits are related to EF.

Previous studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 TD children matched for age, and 21 TD children matched for receptive vocabulary scores were tested on their comprehension and production of both imperfective and perfective verb forms in past tense contexts. Although the groups did not differ in their comprehension performance, the children with LI were less accurate than both comparison groups in producing both imperfective and perfective forms. Based on these results, it appears that children with LI have difficulties selecting the appropriate aspectual marking in past tense contexts.

This study explored whether caregivers' gestures followed the discourse-pragmatic principle of information status of referents (given vs. new) and how their children responded to those gestures when identifying referents. Ten Chinese-speaking and eight English-speaking caregivers were videotaped while interacting spontaneously with their children. Their speech and gestures were coded for referential expressions. Our findings showed that the Chinese-speaking caregivers gestured more often than the English-speaking caregivers but both of the groups gestured more often when asking their children to identify the new referents than the given referents (e.g., pointed to a puzzle while asking “What is this”?). The children were also sensitive to the information status of referents and they relied on the gestures to identify the new referents (but not the given referents). Overall, gesture serves as a potential cue for referential identification in both the caregivers and their children.

English as a foreign language (EFL) spelling was examined longitudinally three times (4th, 9th, 12th grades) during 9 years of EFL study among Hebrew first language (L1) students. The study examined the impact of L1 literacy variables including phonemic awareness, word attack, and spelling on EFL spelling and the relationship between EFL literacy variables and EFL spelling. Results showed that English spelling measured at earlier points strongly predicted later English spelling. L1 literacy skills measured in fourth grade were more significant than English word recognition in explaining end of ninth grade EFL spelling. Beginning of first year EFL letter knowledge in fourth grade predicted end of first-year EFL spelling. These results show qualitatively different L1 and EFL literacy abilities impacting EFL spelling at 4th, 9th, and 12th grades.

We examined the acquisition of initial mental graphemic representations (MGRs) by 46 kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years, 9 months) at risk for literacy development because of low socioeconomic status. Using a storybook context, we exposed children to novel nonwords that varied in their phonotactic and orthotactic probabilities and then assessed the children's development of initial MGRs through spelling and reading recognition tasks. The children developed some initial MGRs but less than past reports of children from middle socioeconomic status backgrounds. Children with more advanced word recognition abilities developed more initial MGRs than their peers with less advanced word recognition skills. Like previous reports, the words' linguistic properties affected initial MGR acquisition and MGR acquisition ability predicted reading and spelling achievement above other known predictors. The results speak to the importance of increasing the print and orthographic knowledge of children at-risk for adequate literacy development.

Although the syntactic priming methodology is a promising tool for language acquisition researchers, using the technique with children raises issues that are not problematic in adult research. The current paper reports on an individual differences study that addressed some of these outstanding issues. (a) Does priming purely reflect syntactic knowledge, or are other processes involved? (b) How can we explain individual differences, which are the norm rather than the exception? (c) Do priming effects in developmental populations reflect the same mechanisms thought to be responsible for priming in adults? One hundred twenty-two (N = 122) children aged 4 years, 5 months (4;5)–6;11 (mean = 5;7) completed a syntactic priming task that aimed to prime the English passive construction, in addition to standardized tests of vocabulary, grammar, and nonverbal intelligence. The results confirmed the widely held assumption that syntactic priming reflects the presence of syntactic knowledge, but not in every instance. However, they also suggested that nonlinguistic processes contribute significantly to priming. Priming was in no way related to age. Finally, the children's linguistic knowledge and nonverbal ability determined the manner in which they were primed. The results provide a clearer picture of what it means to be primed in acquisition.

This study examines the reading patterns of native speakers (NSs) and high-level (Chinese) nonnative speakers (NNSs) on three English sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations. The reading patterns on each sentence type indicate that both NSs and NNSs were biased toward specific structural interpretations. These results are interpreted as evidence that both first-language and second-language (L2) sentence comprehension is guided (at least in part) by structure-based parsing strategies and, thus as counterevidence to the claim that NNSs are largely limited to rudimentary (or “shallow”) syntactic computation during online L2 sentence processing.