bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Grammatical errors in specific language impairment: Competence or performance limitations?
Authors: Bishop D. V. M.
Published: December 2008

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.
Effects of a high information-processing load on the writing process and the story written
Authors: Penningroth Suzanna L. , Rosenberg Sheldon
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this study was to test how information-processing load affects the writing process (through thinking-aloud reports) and the story written. Information-processing load was increased by having subjects write to an ending sentence with more content constraints. Secondary reaction times were synchronized with thinking-aloud statements to yield a measure of cognitive effort for the components of the writing process and for the overall task. A high information-processing load led to lower rated story coherence, but not to lower rated quality. A high load did not increase overall cognitive effort, but changed the distribution of processing time, with more reviewing earlier. Results suggest that a high information-processing load altered the distribution of writing processes, which resulted in lower story coherence.
Phonological development from babbling to speech: Common tendencies and individual differences
Authors: Vihman Marilyn May , Ferguson Charles A. , Elbert Mary
Published: December 2008

Taking as a point of departure Locke's biological model for the origins of phonological development, this study encompasses analyses of phonetic tendencies, consonant use in babbling and early words, and phonological word-selection patterns. Data from 10 children aged 9 to 16 months are drawn from four lexically defined points covering the period from no word use to a cumulative vocabulary of 50 words. Individual differences are found to prevail from the start in all three domains analyzed, with some increase in uniformity across subjects with increasing knowledge of language. Furthermore, the phonological processes typical of development from age 1 to 3 or 4 years are found to be rooted in the phonetic tendencies of the prelinguistic period.
Text cohesion in children's narrative writing
Authors: Cameron Catherine Ann , Lee Kang , Webster Suzanne , Munro Kim , Hunt Anne Kathryn , Linton Murray J.
Published: December 2008

This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower level analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of the variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved to facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and text cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.
Making do with less: Some surprises along the language death proficiency continuum
Authors: Dorian Nancy C.
Published: December 2008

Relative proficiency in Gaelic varies by age in a Highland Scottish region where Gaelic is spoken by a decreasing number of bilinguals in a steadily aging population segment. Although there is a Gaelic proficiency continuum ranging from full fluency (and Gaelic dominance) to minimal generative skills (and English dominance), there are also deviations at both extremes of skill: Fully fluent speakers show self-conscious difficulty with one morphological and four syntactic structures, while minimally proficient speakers show less difficulty than might be expected in the use of conjunctions. An exceptionally keen though low-proficiency speaker can devise unusual means of compensation in using the language. Neither full fluency nor marked deficiency produces altogether predictable levels of structural conservatism or communicative success.
The subset principle in second language acquisition
Authors: Ayoun Dalila
Published: December 2008

This study investigates the applicability of the Subset Principle in the second language (L2) acquisi:ion of the Oblique-Case Parameter by 45 learners of French. First, the Subset Principle is defined and discussed, along with its learnability predictions in first language (L1) acquisition. Then, a brief overview of the relevant literature in L2 acquisition shows that the applicability of the Subset Principle is very much debated. In the present study, the results of a grammaticality judgment task and a correction task provide partial support for the Subset Principle. It seems that the learners have acquired the lack of Exceptional-Case marking and preposition stranding, two of the syntactic properties tested, based on the positive evidence available to them. However, they failed to reject a number of ungrammatical instances of dative alternation and dative passive, leading them to an overgeneralized grammar. It is suggested that L2 learners may need direct or indirect negative evidence to constrain their grammar. Further research is needed to conclude whether the Oblique-Case Parameter really is a parameter of Universal Grammar, and if so, whether adult L2 learners are able to reset their parameters to the proper target language values.
Sonority as a constraint on word identification processes
Authors: Christman Sarah S. , Depaolis Rory A.
Published: December 2008

This study was undertaken as a sequel to DePaolis (1991) to explore the role of sonority in constraining the word identification errors of normal listeners. The data from 9 subjects from DePaolis's study were used to examine the phonological relationships, defined by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (Jespersen, 1904), between response errors and stimulus targets - a methodology previously employed in the analysis of target-related neologisms (Christman, 1992b, 1994). The present study found that, although sonority may constrain onset-driven word-search processes, sonority and lexical phonostatistics may constrain coda-driven word-search processes. These findings are consistent with those obtained from the productive errors of aphasic subjects (Christman, 1994). Taken together, the results of these studies support a role for sonority in phonologically based aspects of word identification and word production.
Promoting idea production by novice writers through the use of discourse-related prompts
Authors: Bakunas Boris
Published: December 2008

This study asked whether exposure to discourse elements affects idea production in novice writers. Different types of prompts were given to 127 high school subjects following the cessation of production. One prompt, termed contentless, was purely motivational; the other, a discourse prompt, conveyed a motivational message as well as information about the discourse structure of the problem/solution text. Subjects given discourse prompts generated significantly more idea units than those given the purely motivational variety. Also, subjects in the discourse-prompting condition spent more time generating ideas. The results held across topic interest and achievement levels, suggesting that instruction in discourse elements may prove beneficial.
Papiamento/Dutch code-switching in bilingual parent–child reading
Authors: Muysken Pieter , Kook Hetty , Vedder Paul
Published: December 2008

Code-switching between Papiamento and Dutch was studied in bilingual parent–child reading sessions in Antillian migrant families (who were to some extent bilingual in Papiamento and Dutch) in the Netherlands. Mothers were asked to read three picture books to their child: one in Dutch, one in Papiamento, and one without text. The code-switching in the data is studied from three perspectives: its relation to bilingual competence, its structural properties, and the implications for language change through lexical borrowing. Our data confirmed the results of earlier studies, which found that intimate code-switching within the clause is characteristic of fluent bilinguals. In our study, this held in particular for knowledge of Papiamento. Structurally, the type of code-switching encountered was predominantly insertional (with Papiamento as the dominant language), thus conforming to the constraints proposed for this type of switching. The single Dutch words that were frequently inserted into Papiamento utterances by the mothers could easily be interpreted by the child as Papiarnento and are likely to become borrowings in the next generation. We conclude with some remarks about the functions of code-switching in our data.
Environmental contamination of normal speech
Authors: Harley Trevor A.
Published: December 2008

Environmentally contaminated speech errors occur when material derived from the speaker's environment but irrelevant to the speaker's intended utterance is erroneously incorporated into speech. Such material may include the names of objects at which speakers are looking, words that speakers are concurrently reading, segments of speech that speakers overhear, or properties of objects in the environment. It was found that although environmental contaminations display less phonological facilitation than other speech error types, they display some semantic facilitation. If the target item and interfering item are from the same syntactic category, a word substitution is more likely to result than a word blend, whereas if the items are from different categories, a blend is more likely. It is hypothesized that environmental contamination occurs at a high level of processing, but with a relatively late insertion point.
Narrative skills and genre knowledge: Ways of telling in the primary school grades
Authors: Hicks Deborah
Published: December 2008

Children in the preschool years develop a linguisticrepertoireof narrative skills as they adapt their ways of representing events to different occasions of language use. The present study examines the abilities of primary school children to draw upon their repertoire of narrative skills in the service of language tasks. Children in grades K-2 were shown a shortened version of the silent film,The Red Balloon, and were asked to perform three narrative tasks: (a) produce an on-line narration of a 3-minute segment from the film, (b) recount the film's events as a news report, and (c) recount the film's events as an embellished story. The narrative texts produced for each task were subjected to analyses of linguistic markers of genre differences. The findings revealed very subtle distinctions between the narrative texts produced for the three genre tasks, leading to the conclusion that primary grade children have only nascent ability to apply their genre knowledge to school language tasks.
Does learning to read in a second language always put the child at a disadvantage? Some counterevidence from Morocco
Authors: Wagner Daniel A. , Spratt Jennifer E. , Ezzaki Abdelkader
Published: December 2008

Researchers have gathered a variety of evidence to support the theory that learning to read in one's “mother tongue” or first language enhances a child's achievement relative to that of children obliged to learn to read in a second language. Evidence collected primarily in Europe and America has been applied by international organizations to support early mother-tongue education programs in many Third World countries. The data reported in this article suggest that a general application of this conclusion is not justified. The present article reports on a longitudinal study of literacy acquisition among 166 grade 1 children from a rural town in Morocco. Children in the sample came from two distinct linguistic communities (Moroccan Arabic and Berber), but lived in the same village, attended the same schools, and received literacy instruction in Arabic and subsequently French. The study also considered a number of background variables that might influence learning to read, such as Quranic preschooling experience, parental literacy, gender, and SES. Analyses showed that while there were significant differences in Arabic (first literacy) reading achievement between Berber- and Arabic-speaking groups in the first year of the study, such differences virtually disappeared by year 5. Quranic preschooling, also conducted in Arabic, was found to be a mediating influence on achievement in grade 1. Learning to read in French (second literacy) was unrelated to Berber or Arabic linguistic background, but highly related to reading achievement in Arabic, thus providing support for Cummins's (1979) “interdependence” hypothesis. Overall, the findings support the proposition that children in certain social and linguistic contexts need not be taught in their mother tongue in order to achieve literacy norms of the majority language group. These findings are discussed in terms of the context of language use and language prestige in the Moroccan setting, and in terms of their potential generalizability to other linguistic and cultural contexts.
Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre
Authors: Kemper Susan , Kynette Donna , Rash Shannon , O'Brien Kevin , Sprott Richard
Published: December 2008

Three different language samples were collected from a group of young adults, 18 to 28 years of age, and a group of elderly adults, 60 to 92 years of age: an oral questionnaire eliciting information about the adults' background, education, and current health and activities; an oral statement describing the person they most admired; and a written statement recounting the most significant event in their lives. In addition, the WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests were administered to the adults. Age-related changes in the length, clause structure, and fluency of the adults' oral answers and oral and written statements were investigated. There was an overall decrement in the complexity of adults' oral and written statements attributable to an age-related loss of left-branching clauses which occurred in all three language samples. Correlations between the length, clause, and fluency measures from the language samples and the education, health, and WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests revealed that better-educated adults scored higher on the WAIS vocabulary test, produced longer utterances, and used more right-branching clauses, and that adults with greater memory capacity, as measured by the WAIS Digits Backward test, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses. Judges found the statements from the elderly adults to be more interesting and clearer than those from the young adults. This finding suggests that there is a trade-off between producing complex syntactic structures and producing clear and interesting prose.
Hearing impaired adolescents' signed and written expression of locative state relations
Authors: Kempt Donna , Maxwell Madeline M.
Published: December 2008

Hearing impaired adolescents from three schools were asked to produce sentences expressing simple locative state relations. Subjects varied on three hearing levels, two ages, and the use or nonuse of sign language. All subjects wrote English sentences to describe pictures; signers also described pictures in sign. Data were analyzed using chi-square procedures. Errors of noun reversal and pragmatic focus were apparent in 7% of the signed responses and 15% of the written responses. Errors were produced by subjects at each age and hearing level, and by signers and nonsigners as well. Most errors were produced by profoundly hearing impaired signers attending public day school (as compared to residential school). Implications for instruction and for further research are discussed.
Pseudoword repetition ability in learning-disabled children
Authors: Taylor H. Gerry , Lean Debra , Schwartz Sybil
Published: December 2008

A test of pseudoword repetition was developed and administered to a group of 24 learning-disabled children. Twenty nondisabled children were also assessed. The major objective was to investigate associations between learning-disabled children's ability to repeat pseudowords and their performances on other measures of phonological processing, as well as on measures of academic achievement. Results revealed that the repetition procedure had good psychometric characteristics, including the ability to distinguish disabled and nondisabled groups independent of IQ. Within the learning-disabled sample, repetition ability was more closely related to reading and spelling skills than to math achievement. Measures of phonological skill were moderately associated with one another. Findings suggest that the repetition task may be useful in identifying one important correlate of childhood learning disabilities. Results justify further research on the mechanisms responsible for repetition difficulties and on the significance of these difficulties for reading and spelling acquisition.
Referential communication and response adequacy in autism and Down's syndrome
Authors: Loveland Katherine A. , Tunalia Belgin , Mcevoy Robin E. , Kelley Michelle L.
Published: December 2008

This study investigated the ability of high-functioning verbal adolescents with autism or Down's syndrome to perform a referential communication task. It was predicted that autistic subjects would require more specific prompting to convey needed information to a listener than would subjects with Down's syndrome of the same verbal level. Subjects, 13 with autism and 14 with Down's syndrome, matched on verbal mental age, learned a simple board game, and were asked to teach it to a listener who used varying levels of prompting to elicit target information. Most subjects in the autistic group required specific prompting to produce the target information, whereas most subjects with Down's syndrome did not. Response adequacy was significantly higher in the Down's syndrome group than in the autistic group at the most general prompt level. Subjects with Down's syndrome used more gesture at the most general prompt level and when producing high adequacy responses, whereas subjects with autism used more gesture when producing low adequacy responses.
Development of speech-like vocalizations in a child with congenital absence of cochleas: The case of total deafness
Authors: Lynch Michael P. , Oller D. Kimbrough , Steffens Michele
Published: December 2008

In order to assess the effect of total deafness on vocalization development, tape recorded utterances of a 3-year-old child who was born without cochleas were examined. In the beginning of the study, the subject's speech consisted almost exclusively of small numbers of sounds characteristic of early infancy. Across the study, the subject participated in extensive vocal stimulation activities. He also initially received intermittent exposure to tactile speech information via a 16-channel vocoder and, subsequently, a 2-channel tactile aid. Following introduction of the 2-channel aid, the subject made rapid improvement in the quality of his vocalizations, which consisted increasingly of speech-like utterances, including well-formed or canonical syllables. These results suggest that, although hearing impairment slows the onset of canonical babbling, even total deafness does not preclude its eventual appearance.
The acquisition of sex-neutral uses of masculine forms in English and Spanish
Authors: Gathercole Virginia C.
Published: December 2008

This study examines the acquisition of sex-neutral uses of masculine terms by English- and Spanish-speaking children. English and Spanish differ in that sex-neutral uses of masculine terms are much more common in the latter, and in that English is a natural-gender language, while Spanish is a grammatical-gender language. For these reasons, it was hypothesized that Spanish-speaking children might discover the neutral, unmarked interpretations of masculine terms earlier than their English-speaking counterparts, who might have difficulty in moving away from an early sex-based interpretation of such forms to their sex-neutral application. Data from 256 children failed to confirm the hypothesis. Subjects from both language groups appeared to pay little attention to gender marking outside the noun, and they both paid less attention to masculine gender markers than to feminine gender markers outside the noun.
Syntactic comprehension in young poor readers
Authors: Smith Suzanne T. , Macaruso Paul , Shankweiler Donald , Crain Stephen
Published: December 2008

Children with specific reading disability fail to understand some complex spoken sentences as well as good readers. This investigation sought to identify the source of poor readers' comprehension difficulties. Second-grade good and poor readers were tested on spoken sentences with restrictive relative clauses in two experiments designed to minimize demands on working memory. The methodological innovations resulted in a high level of performance by both reader groups, demonstrating knowledge of relative clause structure. The poor readers' performance closely paralleled that of the good readers both in pattern of errors and in awareness of the pragmatic aspects of relative clauses. The findings suggest that limitations in processing account for comprehension difficulties displayed by some poor readers in previous investigations.
What do referential communication tasks measure? A study of children with specific language impairment
Authors: Bishop D. V. M. , Adams C.
Published: December 2008

A group of 54 children with specific language impairment was compared with a control group on a referential communication task in which the child was asked to describe a picture from an array of eight similar items so that the listener could identify it. The language-impaired children performed more poorly than age-matched controls. However, there was no relationship between referential communication performance and conversational ability. Children who provided excessive and irrelevant information in conversation did not show the same characteristics in the experimental setting. Formal task requirements, such as the need to scan an array, appeared to be a major determinant of performance on structured referential communication tasks. These tasks are not sensitive to the types of pragmatic difficulty that some children have in open-ended conversation.
Phonological effects shown by normal adult speakers learning new words: Implications for phonological development
Authors: Smith Bruce L. , Macaluso Cynthia , Brown-Sweeney Sharon
Published: December 2008

Phonological processes have been used to describe children’s speech for a number of years, but the causes of most processes remain unexplained. In a study investigating possible sources of processes in children’s speech, Aitchison and Chiat (1981) suggested that many developmental phonological processes may be a result of problems in lexical storage and retrieval. One limitation of their study, however, was that they had no adult control group, whose results might have helped clarify their findings. The present research with adults was similar to Aitchison and Chiat’s investigation with children and was intended to provide additional information about whether children’s typical phonological processes generally involve lexical storage and recall difficulties. Caution is advised in assuming that children’s spontaneous phonological processes are generally a result of lexical storage and recall factors.
The influences of number of syllables and wordlikeness on children’s repetition of nonwords
Authors: Gathercole Susan E. , Willis Cath , Emslie Hazel , Baddeley Alan D.
Published: December 2008

It has recently been suggested that the developmental association between nonword repetition performance and vocabulary knowledge reflects the contribution of phonological memory processes to vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). An alternative account of the association is that the child uses existing vocabulary knowledge to support memory for nonwords. The present article tests between these two alternative accounts by evaluating the role of phonological memory and linguistic factors in nonword repetition. In a longitudinal database, repetition accuracy in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds was found to be sensitive to two independent factors: a phonological memory factor, nonword length, and a linguistic factor, wordlikeness. To explain these combined influences, it is suggested that repeating nonwords involves temporary phonological memory storage which may be supported by either a specific lexical analogy or by an appropriate abstract phonological frame generated from structurally similar vocabulary items.
Words, nonwords, and phonological processes: Some comments on Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley
Authors: Snowling Maggie , Chiat Shula , Hulme Charles
Published: December 2008

Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley (1991) present a reanalysis of some of their earlier data concerned with the relationship between nonword repetition and the development of vocabulary knowledge in young children. In the present article we outline some theoretical differences between ourselves and this group in the interpretation of nonword repetition and discuss how best these differences could be resolved.
English and Japanese interlanguage comprehension strategies: An analysis based on the competition model
Authors: Sasaki Yoshinori
Published: December 2008

In an experiment based on the competition model, 12 native Japanese speakers (J1 group) and 12 native English speakers studying Japanese (JFL group) were requested to report sentence subjects after listening to Japanese word strings which consisted of one verb and two nouns each. Similarly, 12 native English speakers (E1 group) and 12 native Japanese speakers studying English (EFL group) reported the sentence subjects of English word strings. In each word string, syntactic (word order) cues and lexical-semantic (animacy/inanimacy) cues converged or diverged as to the assignment of the sentence subjects. The results show that JFL-Ss (experimental subjects) closely approximated the response patterns of J1-Ss, while EFL-Ss showed evidence of transfer from their first language, Japanese. The results are consistent with the developmental precedence of a meaning-based comprehension strategy over a grammar-based one.
Phonology and grammatical morphology in specific language impairment: Accounting for individual variation in English and Italian
Authors: Bortolini Umberta , Leonard Laurence B.
Published: December 2008

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show more limited use of grammatical morphology than younger, normally developing children matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU). However, within groups of children with SLI, individual differences are seen in grammatical morpheme use. In this study, we examined the role of weak syllable use in explaining some of these differences. Employing two different languages – English and Italian - children with SLI were placed into pairs. The children in each pair showed similar MLUs; however, one member of the pair showed a greater use of particular function words. In each of the pairs examined in both languages, the children with the greater use of function words also showed a greater use of weak syllables that did not immediately follow strong syllables. The weak syllable productions of children showing a more limited use of function words in each pair seemed to be dependent on a strong syllable-weak syllable production sequence. This sequence appeared to be operative across several prosodic levels, as defined within the framework of prosodic phonology. Because weak syllables that follow strong syllables usually have longer durations than those that precede strong syllables, the findings might have a perceptual basis. However, the results raise the possibility that limitations in prosody can restrict the degree of grammatical morpheme use by children with SLI.
Relation of cognitive style to metaphor interpretation and second language proficiency
Authors: Johnson Janice , Rosano Teresa
Published: December 2008

This study examined relationships among measures of language proficiency, cognitive style, and metaphor comprehension. Subjects were university students who were native English speakers or who were enrolled in a course on English as a second language (ESL). Consistent with predictions, native English speakers scored better than ESL students on academic measures of English proficiency, but there were no group differences on level of cognitive sophistication in English metaphor interpretation or on a measure of metaphor fluency (number of metaphor interpretations produced). For ESL students, metaphor fluency was positively related to a measure of English communicative proficiency, whereas a measure of field independence was negatively related with both metaphor fluency and communicative proficiency. These findings on cognitive style are consistent with theoretical predictions that have heretofore found little empirical support in the second language literature.
The acquisition of conditionals in American Sign Language: Grammaticized facial expressions
Authors: Reilly Judy Snitzer , Mcintire Marina , Bellugi Ursula
Published: December 2008

An unusual facet of American Sign Language (ASL) is its use of grammaticized facial expression. In this study, we examine the acquisition of conditional sentences in ASL by 14 deaf children (ages 3;3–8;4) of deaf parents. Conditional sentences were chosen because they entail the use of both manual signs and grammaticized non-manual facial expressions. The results indicate that the children first acquire manual conditional signs, e.g., SUPPOSE, before they use the obligatory grammaticized conditional facial expression. Moreover, the children acquire the constellation of obligatory non-manual behaviors component by component, rather than holistically.
Metaphor in using and understanding euphemism and dysphemism
Authors: Pfaff Kerry L. , Gibbs Raymond W. , Johnson Michael D.
Published: December 2008

Six experiments examined the role of metaphorical knowledge in people's use and understanding of euphemisms and offensive expressions. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that familiar euphemisms and dysphemisms are viewed as more appropriate and are easier to comprehend when there is a conceptual match between them and the context. The data from Experiments 3 and 4 showed a similar pattern for novel euphemisms and offensive phrases. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out the hypothesis that the previous results were due to semantic priming. The findings from these experiments indicate that people's metaphorical conceptualization of a certain topic can influence the processing time and appropriate use of euphemistic and dysphemistic expressions.
Bilingual word recognition in English and Greek
Authors: Chitiri Helena-Fivi , Willows Dale M.
Published: December 2008

The word recognition processes of proficient bilinguals were examined in their mother tongue (Greek) and in English in relation to the linguistic and syntactic characteristics along which the two languages differ. Their processes were then compared with those of monolingual readers.The following issues were addressed: the nature of bilingual functioning, whether it is language specific, and the factors that affect second language reading development. These issues were examined within the context of a letter cancellation paradigm. The results indicated that bilingual readers performed differently in each of their two languages, conforming more the monolingual patterns in their mother tongue than to those in their second language. This discrepancy was interpreted as a lack of coordination of different word recognition skills in the second language.
Relationships between narrative and syntactic competencies in school-aged, hearing-impaired children
Authors: Weiss Amy L. , Johnson Cynthia J.
Published: December 2008

School-aged, hearing-impaired children's propensity for incorporating complex syntax into the narratives and conversations they produced was investigated. Language samples containing both conversations and narratives in the form of story retellings were collected from seven subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing losses. Both portions of the samples were analyzed for a set of basic and complex syntax features discussed in the developmental literature. In addition, the narrative portions of the samples were analyzed for the subjects' use of the components of story grammar, appropriate use of cohesion, and episode integrity.
Word awareness in hearing-impaired children
Authors: Gartner Gloria M. , Trehub Sandra E. , Soroka Sherri Mackay
Published: December 2008

Normally hearing children (aged 4–10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6–14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed significantly better than hearing-impaired children. However, orally educated children with mild or moderate hearing losses did not perform better than children with severe or profound losses. Instead, hearingimpaired children exhibited marked metalinguistic deficits, regardless of their degree of hearing loss. Finally, bimodally educated children performed significantly worse than orally educated children on the metalinguistic tasks of the present study. The implications of these findings for educational instruction are discussed.
Processing of center-embedded and right-branching relative clause sentences by normal elderly individuals
Authors: Baum Shari R.
Published: December 2008

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20–29 years, 60–69 years, 70–79 years, and 80–89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. Results of the lexical decision task revealed longer reaction times and somewhat different patterns of performance for the older subjects as compared to the young subjects; on the repetition task, the oldest subjects performed more poorly overall. Findings are suggestive of a reduction in computational capacity in the elderly subjects, which may account for observed decrements in syntactic processing as compared to young adults.
Articulation and phoneme awareness of 3-year-old children
Authors: Thomas Eleanor M. , Sénéchal Monique
Published: December 2008

This report presents findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study examining the development of articulation quality and specific phoneme awareness during the fourth year of life. Articulation and phoneme awareness of /r/ and a control phoneme were assessed for 80 3-year-old children. Children whose articulation of /r/ was accurate for all items were contrasted with those who were accurate on none. The groups differed in their awareness of /r/, after controlling for awareness of the control phoneme on two of the three phoneme awareness tasks and after controlling for relevant cognitive variables. These findings support the hypothesis that accuracy of articulation is related to quality of phoneme awareness in young children.
Open class and closed class: Sentence-imitation experiments on intrasentential code-switching
Authors: Azuma Shoji , Meier Richard P.
Published: December 2008

One of the most striking facts about exchange errors in speech is that open class items are exchanged, but closed class items are not. This article argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching. Intrasentential code-switching is the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilinguals. Studies of the spontaneous conversation of bilinguals have supported the claim that open class items may be codeswitched, but closed class items may not. This claim was tested by two sentence repetition experiments, one with Japanese/English bilinguals and the other with Spanish/English bilinguals. The results show that the switching of closed class items caused significantly longer response times and more errors than the switching of open class items.
Poor readers are not easy to fool: Comprehension of adjectives with exceptional control properties
Authors: Macaruso Paul , Shankweiler Donald , Byrne Brian , Crain Stephen
Published: December 2008

An earlier experiment by Byrne (1981) found that young, poor readers tend to act out sentences containing adjectives with object control, like easy, as though they were adjectives with subject control, like eager. Byrne interpreted this result as evidence that poor readers lag in the acquisition of syntactic knowledge underlying this distinction. However, the possibility that a processing limitation could have contributed to the poor readers' difficulties with objectcontrol adjectives had not been fully explored. In an effort to tease apart these alternatives, we tested comprehension of object-control adjectives in second grade good and poor readers, using both an act-out task and a sentence-picture matching task. Contrary to Byrne's (1981) results, we did not find significant group differences in interpreting object-control adjectives with either task. Reasons for the discrepancy are suggested, and remedies for the pitfalls in designing experiments to assess syntactic knowledge in young children are proposed.
Skilled performance, practice, and the differentiation of speed-up from automatization effects: Evidence from second language word recognition
Authors: Segalowitz Norman S. , Segalowitz Sidney J.
Published: December 2008

Practice on cognitive tasks, in general, and word recognition tasks, in particular, will usually lead to faster and more stable responding. We present an analysis of the relationship between observed reductions in performance latency and latency variability with respect to whether processing has merely become faster across the board or whether a qualitative change, such as automatization, has taken place. The coefficient of variability (CV) - the standard deviation of response time divided by the mean latency - is shown to be useful for this purpose. A cognitive interpretation of the CV is given that relates it to issues of skill development.Data from second language learners' word recognition performance and from a simple detection task are presented which confirm predictions drawn from this interpretation of the cognitive significance of the CV. Initial improvement in a second language word recognition task was interpreted as involving more efficient controlled processing, which later gave way to automatization. The implications of this index of skill are discussed in relation to second language development and the general issue of automaticity of processing components in cognitive skills.
Babbling of twins in a bilingual environment
Authors: Zlatić Larisa , Macneilage Peter F. , Matyear Christine L. , Davis Barbara L.
Published: December 2008

Transcriptions of 17 hours of recordings of babbling by fraternal twins in an English/Serbian language environment (1,454 utterances) were analyzed for basic aspects of articulatory organization, effects of the “twin situation,” and effects of the two ambient languages, English and Serbian. Predictions that babbling would be dominated by a “frame” provided by rhythmic mandibular oscillation were, for the most part, confirmed in the form of consonant-vowel co-occurrence constraints showing little active intersegmental tongue movement (one subject) and a predominance of “vertical” (mandible-induced) intersyllabic variegation (both subjects). A possible effect of the twin situation was observed in the form of unusually high frequencies of the consonants and vowels most frequent in babbling. The only prominent ambient language effect was a relatively high frequency of palatal glides (palatals are common in Serbian).
Developmental word-finding difficulties and phonological processing: The case of the missing handcuffs
Authors: Constable Alison , Stackhouse Joy , Wells Bill
Published: December 2008

The case of a 7-year-old boy (Michael) with severe word-finding difficulties is presented. In an attempt to investigate the cause of these difficulties, a series of theoretically motivated questions was used as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation. A range of tasks was administered, including word association, semantic knowledge, auditory discrimination, auditory lexical decision, naming, and real word and nonword repetition. Michael's performance on the tasks was compared with that of controls matched in terms of chronological and vocabulary age. Results revealed significant differences between Michael's performance and that of the control groups. Although he showed no apparent semantic deficit, he did show pervasive deficits in phonological processing.
Sight, sound and ceremony in the chapel of Galeazzo Maria Sforza
Authors: Welch Evelyn S.
Published: December 2008

Bernardino Corio's late fifteenth-century history of Milan covers the city's past from its foundations to the collapse of the Sforza dynasty. Following the historiographic traditions established by Leonardo Bruni, its essential outlines are founded on careful use of sources and, for more recent events, contemporary memories and impressions. It is, however, also characterised by judicious revisionism and anecdotal invention. The careful reader always needs to ask why digressions have been included and what hidden points are being made. It is therefore well worth inquiring why Corio, a member of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza's court, chose to link his master's assassination on 26 December 1476 with a passage on his chapel choir and musical taste.
A perspective on the southern Italian sequence: the second tonary of the manuscript Monte Cassino 318
Authors: Brunner Lance W.
Published: December 2008

The medieval sequence was one of the most distinguished artistic achievements of the Carolingian age. In creating the genre, Frankish poet–musicians moulded text and music into a new and extraordinary synthesis, and created a composition that stood proudly apart from the Gregorian Propers that surrounded it in the Mass. The new style must have spread quickly throughout the Frankish Empire, eventually reaching well beyond its borders. Pieces from the earliest centres travelled far and wide and inspired new works at every turn — faithful imitations or adaptations, as well as works in which the style was consciously modified to reflect the different aesthetics of distant realms. The legacy of surviving sources, however, does not permit the details of these early developments to be traced; even the precise dates and places where the sequence was first cultivated remain obscure. The earliest surviving sources from most regions give access to only relatively mature stages of development, which already reveal a complex web of interrelationships that has been difficult to untangle.
The Mary Magdalene scene in the ‘Visitatio sepulchri’ ceremonies
Authors: Rankin Susan K.
Published: December 2008

Since Edmond de Coussemaker published the texts and melodies of ten liturgical dramas in 1860, the fundamental role of music in these ceremonies has been recognised. Regrettably, however, apart from a few isolated and restricted studies, amid a wealth of general literature on the subject there is still no comprehensive critical account of the musical content of these medieval ceremonies, nor of the ways in which it changed over the long period during which the genre was cultivated. Precise and detailed musical studies have tended to discuss individual examples of varied types of liturgical drama, rather than make a systematic study of a chosen layer or tradition in the repertory; and enquiries into the manner of composition of the music have been directed towards looking for dramatic or emotive features, to establishing motivic connections between the various melodies of a given ceremony, or to postulating motivic connections between the melodies of a given ceremony and the Gregorian chant. All these studies neglect one of the most important compositional aspects of the liturgical drama — the re-use of old material — and thereby fail to offer true insights into exactly how the melodies in any ceremony or group of ceremonies were composed. Only in three essays by Walther Lipphardt – on the introductory scene of theVisitatio sepulchriceremonies, the Magi ceremonies, and the MainzVisitatio sepulchritradition – has an attempt been made to trace the paths of certain melodies through different sources.
Diatonicficta
Authors: Bent Margaret
Published: December 2008

This is a preliminary study of how what we call pitch was conceptualised in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Its central concern is with vocally conceived, contrapuntally based polyphony around 1500, and our notational access to it. It does not deal directly with monophony (which only rarely compels a distinction between relative and fixed sounds) or with instrumental music and tablatures (which, for practical reasons, had to work with a preselected repertory of sounds). It attempts to combine some realities of performance with the testimony of contemporary theorists.
Classical tragedy in the history of early opera in Rome
Authors: Murata Margaret
Published: December 2008

The earliest operas are few, and their history is a history of particulars: of the interests of individual Renaissance humanists; of the ways in which certain musicians sang; of the development of Italian poetry for music; and of the theatrical traditions within which the new genre was accepted and propagated. Recent music history has tended to stress the sixteenth-century antecedents for these aspects of opera, without forgetting, however, that the common inspiration forDafne, Anima e CorpoandEuridice– as well as for some earlier Florentine intermedi – was the desire to emulate the effects of the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Florence this was realised at the granducal court with the help of its satellite circles of educated nobles. In Rome, knowledge of the ancients was the province of professional scholars, the priests and religious who taught in the seminaries and colleges, and for whom Seneca and Terence would have been more familiar fare than Tasso and Guarini. Thus after Cavalieri staged hisRappresentatione di Anima et di Corpounder the auspices of the Oratorians, it is not surprising that the next Roman musical drama is a carnival school play given by boys and composed by their professor. In Rome, furthermore, the princes and prelates of the Church exercised their tastes for fine literature with transformations of Pindar and Horace designed to inspire Christian devotion.