bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Phonological decoding in severely and profoundly deaf children: Similarity judgment
between written pseudowords
Authors: TRANSLER C. , GOMBERT J. E. , LEYBAERT J.
Published: November 2002

This study attempted to determine whether phonological decoding could be observed among
severely and profoundly deaf children during reading. For this purpose, the ability of 20 deaf
children to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudowords (a model item and
two test items) was investigated. In the first condition, one of the test items was a homophone of
the model (e.g., kise, kyse, kine). In the second condition, one
of the test items had the same first syllable as the model item, as defined by its structure or by
nasalization (e.g., lan.jier, lan.du, la.nud). The results
demonstrated that deaf children with good speech levels, as well as hearing children matched on
word reading level, were sensitive to homophony when visual proximity between the model and
test items were controlled. They were also sensitive to syllabic structure when the first syllables
were CV and in the nasalization condition. By contrast, deaf children with poor speech abilities
did not show this pattern of results in all conditions. The possibility that the latter results could be
explained by deaf children's sensitivity to orthographic frequency phenomena is discussed.
A link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills is suggested, and the
implications of those results for a general understanding of the reading processes of deaf children
are presented.
Transfer of sentence processing strategies: A comparison of L2 learners of Chinese and
English
Authors: SU I-RU
Published: November 2002

A sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's Competition
Model was administered to L2 learners of English and Chinese at three different stages of
learning. The main purposes of the research were (a) to examine how transfer patterns at the
sentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and (b) to investigate whether or
how transfer patterns found in Chinese EFL learners (i.e., native speakers of a semantics-based
language learning a syntax-centered target language) differ from those found in English CFL
learners (i.e., native speakers of a syntax-based language acquiring a semantics-centered one). The
results show that transfer patterns do vary as a function of proficiency, and that Chinese EFL
learners and English CFL learners display somewhat different patterns of developmental change in
sentence processing transfer.
Bilingual long-term working memory: The effects of working memory loads on writing
quality and fluency
Authors: RANSDELL SARAH , ARECCO M. ROSARIO , LEVY C. MICHAEL
Published: November 2002

In Experiment 1, 42 multilinguals were able to maintain native language writing quality and
fluency in the presence of unattended irrelevant speech while maintaining a concurrent 6-digit
memory load. In Experiment 2, 80 bilinguals reduced fluency during writing with the 6-digit load
only. In previous research, over 100 monolinguals of comparable verbal and nonverbal skills in
three experiments reduced quality and fluency under both secondary tasks (Ransdell, Levy, &
Kellogg, 1996). The results are interpreted in terms of a bilingual skill advantage in suppressing
irrelevant information. Possessing fluency in another language may confer long-term working
memory benefits during dual-task language conditions for bilinguals and even more so for
multilinguals.
Breadth and depth of vocabulary in relation to L1/L2 acquisition and frequency of input
Authors: VERMEER ANNE
Published: November 2002

Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of word
knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input.
In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual and
bilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and association
tasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and the
input frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4- and 7-year-olds. These
studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary,
and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingual
speakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers with
respect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency in
primary education.
Effects of word class differences on L2 pronunciation accuracy
Authors: YENI-KOMSHIAN GRACE H. , ROBBINS MEDINA , FLEGE JAMES E.
Published: November 2002

This study examined the effect of word class (nouns vs. verbs) on L2 pronunciation accuracy
of Korean–English bilinguals. The participants were 192 adult immigrants whose age of
arrival (AOA) in the United States ranged from 6 to 23 years. Transcriptions of their productions
of English sentences indicated that they were more accurate in pronouncing verbs than nouns.
Similarly, the results of a grammaticality judgment test revealed that they were more accurate in
detecting incorrect formulations of verbs than nouns. These effects were significant in late L2
learners (AOA 12–23). The results were interpreted to reflect the influence of the linguistic
structure of Korean (where the verb is more prominent than the noun) on learning English as an
L2.
Does strength of phonological representations predict phonological awareness in preschool
children?
Authors: FOY JUDITH G. , MANN VIRGINIA
Published: November 2002

Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early
reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to
the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme
awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with
measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined
rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter
and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal
reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of
reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary
construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective
pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness.
Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary,
and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less
mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme
awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low
phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors
than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of
age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.
Auditory word identification and phonological skills in dyslexic and average readers
Authors: GRIFFITHS YVONNE M. , SNOWLING MARGARET J.
Published: November 2002

Despite the evidence for a core phonological deficit in dyslexia, the nature of this deficit at the
level of the phonological representation is not well understood. In this study, the auditory word
gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in
dyslexic and average readers. Although the dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and
rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of
acoustic–phonetic input required to identify sets of words that varied in word frequency
and phonological neighborhood density. These results indicate that input phonological processing,
as tapped by the gating task, is normal in this group of dyslexic children, whereas their deficits on
the RAN tasks suggest that there are problems with phonological retrieval. The implications of
these results are considered in relation to the phonological representations hypothesis of dyslexia;
the evidence suggests that what is impaired in dyslexia are the retrieval processes that operate on
phonological representations.
Nonword repetition and young children's receptive vocabulary: A longitudinal study
Authors: BOWEY JUDITH A.
Published: November 2002

A longitudinal study investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to
vocabulary acquisition in young children. In the first phase, children were given tests of receptive
vocabulary, receptive grammar, nonword repetition, phonological sensitivity (or
“awareness”), and performance IQ. In the second phase, children were given the
nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary tests. In Session 1, both nonword repetition and
phonological sensitivity accounted for variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar after
performance IQ effects were controlled. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled,
nonword repetition did not account for significant additional variation in receptive vocabulary and
grammar. When performance IQ and autoregression effects were controlled, all Session 1 verbal
ability measures predicted Session 2 vocabulary, but only Session 1 vocabulary predicted Session
2 nonword repetition. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, Session 1 nonword
repetition (leniently scored) predicted Session 2 vocabulary. Overall, these findings show qualified
support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to
vocabulary in young children. They suggest that the association between nonword repetition and
vocabulary in young children may, to a substantial extent, reflect a latent phonological processing
ability that is also manifest in phonological sensitivity.
The development of reading in English and Italian in bilingual children
Authors: D'ANGIULLI AMEDEO , SIEGEL LINDA S. , SERRA EMILY
Published: November 2002

Canadian children (n = 81; 9–13 years) who spoke both English and Italian were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. There was a significant relationship between English and Italian across all phonological tasks. The relationship was less evident for syntactic skills and was generally absent for working memory measures. Analyses of phonological, syntactic, and memory processes based on levels of skill in English reading showed significantly better performance by skilled readers compared to less skilled readers; this was also true for the 11- to 13-year-olds compared to the 9- to 10-year-olds. Similar results were obtained as a function of levels of skill in Italian reading. On all Italian tasks, the bilingual children lagged behind monolingual children matched on age. However, less skilled and skilled bilingual Italian children had significantly higher scores than monolingual English–Canadian children (with comparable reading skills) on English tasks involving reading, spelling, syntactic awareness, and working memory. The results suggest that English–Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing, but it may influence other linguistic modules. In addition, exposure to a language with more predictable grapheme–phoneme correspondences, such as Italian, may enhance phonological skills in English.
Native and non-native processing of English wh- questions: Parsing strategies and plausibility constraints
Authors: WILLIAMS JOHN N. , MÖBIUS PETER , KIM CHOONKYONG
Published: November 2002

The two experiments reported here investigated the processing of English wh- questions by native speakers of English and advanced Chinese, German, and Korean learners of English as a second language. Performance was evaluated in relation to parsing strategies and sensitivity to plausibility constraints. In an on-line plausibility judgment task, both native and non-native speakers behaved in similar ways. All groups postulated a gap at the first position consistent with the grammar, as predicted by the filler-driven strategy and as shown by garden path or filled-gap effects that were induced when the hypothesized gap location turned out to be incorrect. In addition, all subjects interpreted the plausibility of the filler-gap dependency, as shown by a reduction in the garden path effect when the initial analysis was implausible. However, the native speakers' reading profiles showed evidence of a more immediate effect of plausibility than those of the non-native speakers, suggesting that they initiated reanalysis earlier when the first analysis was implausible. Experiment 2 showed that the non-native speakers had difficulty canceling a plausible gap hypothesis even in an off-line (pencil and paper) task, whereas for the native speakers there was no evidence that the sentences caused difficulty in this situation. The results suggest that native and non-native speakers employ similar strategies in immediate on-line processing and hence are garden-pathed in similar ways, but they differ in their ability to recover from misanalysis.
Can variation in mother–child interaction be explained by context and collectivistic attitudes?
Authors: TULVISTE TIIA
Published: November 2002

Focusing on mother–child verbal interactions in two different contexts, the present study examined whether differences in maternal conversational style could be explained by children's linguistic and conversational abilities and by the mothers' expressed attitudes to collectivism. To this end, 20 Estonian mothers were videotaped with their 6-year-old children during mealtime and puzzle solving, and they were asked to fill in a questionnaire on collectivistic attitudes. The results showed that the mothers' frequency of engaging children in conversation was not related to the children's linguistic and conversational abilities. The children talked more and spoke more complexly during puzzle solving. The context had a great influence on the maternal regulatory speech. Contrary to the expectations, mothers who scored higher in collectivism were not more directive; instead, they tended to be more talkative.
Children's own names influence their spelling
Authors: TREIMAN REBECCA , KESSLER BRETT , BOURASSA DERRICK
Published: November 2002

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children's own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children's own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters.
Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests
Authors: ELLIS NICK C. , HOOPER A. MARI
Published: November 2002

This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.
Morphological cues to verb meaning
Authors: CARR LAURA , JOHNSTON JUDITH
Published: November 2002

Two experiments investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. In Study I, 3- to 5-year-olds with typical language development were asked to extend novel verbs to new instances. They heard the verbs inflected with either -ed or -ing and were given a forced choice between events that maintained either the activity or the result of the original event. The younger children selected events according to the verb inflection: same-activity events for -ing and same-result events for -ed. Older preschoolers chose same-result events throughout. Study II was conducted to investigate the nature of this causal bias. A group of 4- to 5-year-olds with specific language impairment completed the same verb extension task. They were equivalent to the older Study I children in age and IQ but were at lower language levels than the younger group. Children in the SLI group used neither the inflectional strategy nor the same-result strategy. Findings from the two studies point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. The discussion focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional bootstrapping and the linguistic character of the same-result bias that replaces it.
Noun phrase morphology in Swedish-speaking children with specific language impairment
Authors: LEONARD LAURENCE B. , SALAMEH EVA-KRISTINA , HANSSON KRISTINA
Published: November 2002

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.
Adult ESL: Politics, pedagogy, and participation in classroom and community
programs. Trudy Smoke (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. Pp. 337.
Authors: Strucker John
Published: November 2002

This anthology consists of 20 chapters contributed by 25 authors and coauthors; its articles
are divided into three sections corresponding to the title categories: politics, pedagogy, and
participation. As Trudy Smoke states in the preface, “I decided to use the term adult ESL in its broadest sense – non-native speaking adults who participate in ABE (adult basic education), community college, or senior college programs” (p. ix). However, about 75% of the articles are written from a community college or senior college perspective, with a focus on intermediate-level or above English language learners. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; in fact, it may be inevitable that college ESL teachers are more likely to be able to write articles than their ABE colleagues, who are among the most overworked and underpaid teachers in U.S. education. Smoke notes briefly that some ESL students in ABE programs eventually enroll in community and senior colleges, but for the most part the reader is left having to infer how the insights of college ESL practice and research might apply to teachers in community-based ABE programs in ESL. A more extended discussion of the similarities and differences between ABE and college-based learners would have made the book more useful,
especially for new teachers or other readers not familiar with the field.
Making phonology functional: What do I do first? Shelley L. Velleman. Boston:
Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. Pp. 228.
Authors: Pennington Martha C.
Published: November 2002

This book focuses on non-functional phonologies (NFP): that is, phonological disorders with
no known physiological or neurological causes. It is a substantial book, well written and carefully
researched, with an applied and pedagogical orientation that will make it invaluable for clinicians
and students in speech pathology and child phonology. It is an ambitious and original work; its
practical guidance for those assessing child phonology is based on a comprehensive and
up-to-date descriptive and theoretical review of phonological systems and their realization in
children's speech. It consists of six chapters, each of which introduces general concepts of
phonology as well as modern concepts of nonlinear phonology and includes practical material,
most notably a set of original worksheets that are geared to assessment or other types of
intervention. It also has three appendices: the first reviews commercial tests, the second provides
examples of stress patterns in English lexical items, and the third presents conventions of the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
Susan Gass, Antonella Sorace, and Larry Selinker. Second language data analysis (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 1999. Pp. 131.
Authors: Pennington Martha C.
Published: November 2002

This workbook is a revised edition of the volume published in 1984 by Larry Selinker and Susan Gass entitled Workbook in Second Language Acquisition. Like the first edition, this edition provides a research-centered view of second language acquisition (SLA) that seeks to build an awareness of the issues, types of data, and methods of analysis through a series of practical problems of data analysis and related questions. The data and problems, which all focus on English as the target language, are drawn from articles published between 1968 and 1993, the majority of them “SLA classics” published in the 1980s. The book includes a short glossary and has accompanying tape-recorded material not provided to the reviewer.
WordNet: An electronic lexical database. Christiane Fellbaum (Ed.). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. 423.
Authors: Oram Peter
Published: November 2002

WordNet is an on-line relational database of the English lexicon developed by George Miller
and coworkers at Princeton University (Miller, Beckwith, Fellbaum, Gross, & Miller, 1990).
The meaning of a particular word in WordNet is expressed principally through its relations to
other words and sets of synonyms, with the structure of the database reflecting the current
psycholinguistic understanding of the mental lexicon.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon. Michael B. Broe and Janet
B. Pierrehumbert (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 414.
Authors: Vihman Marilyn
Published: November 2002

This stimulating volume is the outcome of a 1996 conference, the first in the laboratory
phonology series to incorporate psycholinguistic topics, including six chapters addressing
acquisition. Here, as in the earlier conferences, the primary focus is on the relationship between
phonetics and phonology. For example, in the first section, “Articulation and Mental
Representation,” Munhall, Kawato, and Vatikiotis-Bateson provide a lucid account of the
state of the art in physical models of articulation; they conclude with a discussion of the difficulty
of identifying the interface between phonology and speech production. In a related study, the
relevance of overarching prosodic structure (“phrasal signatures”) to low-level
articulatory effects is illustrated in some detail by Byrd, Kaun, Narayanan, and Saltzman, who find
that “prosodic structure is manifest in the details of articulation. . . . The abstract symbolic
representation useful to linguistics [must be integrated] with a dynamical model of
human movement useful to speech scientists” (p. 85).
Gesture, speech, and sign. Lynn Messing and Ruth Campbell (Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 227.
Authors: Rowe Meredith L.
Published: November 2002

The study of gesture, especially its relationship to spoken and signed languages, has become a broadly studied topic for researchers from various fields, including neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, human development, and communication disorders. One possible reason for the wide interest in gesture is its universality. People of all ages and cultures use gestures for various purposes. Young language-learning, hearing children often use gestures alone or in combination with speech to help express themselves to their interlocutors, for example, pointing to a desired object while saying “mine.” As a more striking example, deaf children in Nicaragua who had previously been unexposed to any conventional sign language, used gestures to develop home-sign systems that eventually developed into Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). On the other hand, gestures are often used in situations where the underlying purpose of the gesture is less clear. For example, people who are blind from birth are nonetheless found to gesture in conversation (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1997), and adults gesture frequently, and often subconsciously, during conversations with one another. Despite their omnipresence, we know relatively little about gestures' origins, their relationship to language, and, in some instances, the purposes they serve.
The development of language processing strategies: A cross-linguistic study between
Japanese and English. Reiko Mazuka. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998. Pp. 156.
Authors: Minami Masahiko
Published: November 2002

One of the most fundamental, yet often neglected, or even paradoxical questions in the field
of language acquisition is how children who have not yet acquired stable grammar can process
language and still manage to acquire new grammar. This question is further complicated by
cross-linguistic differences, such as how English- and Japanese-speaking children process complex
sentences in their respective languages. To answer these two intricate questions, we need to
identify cross-linguistically common – possibly universal or quasi-universal –
characteristics in terms of the development of language processing strategies. At the same time,
we also need to know whether different language processing strategies are used by children who
speak different languages. We thus need to take both developmental and cross-linguistic issues
into consideration simultaneously.
Understanding children with language problems. Shula Chiat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 286.
Authors: Silverman Stacy
Published: November 2002

Examining the language abilities of children with language disorders should be a deductive process, using much more than the data that formal measures provide. The assessment should be a systematic, psycholinguistic exploration of aspects of a child's input and output, with a focus on the attempt to pinpoint specific areas of deficit within the language-processing system. Chiat, in this insightful and extremely accessible book, provides basic profiles of children with language disorders, along with case study examples, that both illustrate various forms of language disorder and demonstrate the use of tasks, commonly applied in psycholinguistic research, to problem-solve specific cases. Chiat is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at City University, London, where she is an established researcher who focuses primarily on phonological development and disorders and the impact of impaired phonology on lexical/semantic development.
Complex sentence production by adolescents with Down syndrome
Authors: THORDARDOTTIR ELIN T. , CHAPMAN ROBIN S. , WAGNER LAURA
Published: November 2002

The use of complex syntax was investigated in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome (n = 24) and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Both groups used conjoined and subordinate sentence forms and did not differ significantly in either the proportion of utterances containing complex sentences or in the variety of complex sentence types used. The analysis of developmental patterns suggested a similar order of acquisition across groups. The findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple syntax. This study does not support earlier findings of a critical period effect in syntactic development in Down syndrome based on age or syntactic complexity.
Morphosyntactic forms of African American English used by young children and their caregivers
Authors: WASHINGTON JULIE A. , CRAIG HOLLY K.
Published: November 2002

The study of African American English (AAE) has been historically focused on the dialectal variations of adolescent and adult speakers. More recent investigations of dialect used by very young AAE speakers were undertaken with the goal of describing the language produced by early elementary and preschool-aged children. One important outcome of these studies is increased attention to the importance of considering the impact of developmental influences in our characterizations of dialect use. In this study we explore the differences between primary caregivers and their young children in dialect use across generations by directly examining the dialectal variations apparent during play interactions between primary caregivers and their young children. We conclude that there is indeed evidence in these interactions of differences between the child and caregiver in the structure and use of individual AAE features. Another conclusion is that there are many similarities in the distribution of AAE between these older and younger interactants, highlighting not only their kinship ties but also their membership in the same linguistic community.
Word recognition in individuals with left and right hemisphere damage: The role of lexical stress
Authors: BAUM SHARI R.
Published: November 2002

Lexical stress patterns appear to be important in word recognition processes in normal individuals. The present investigation employed a lexical decision task to assess whether left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients are similarly sensitive to stress patterns in lexical access. The results confirmed that individuals without brain damage are influenced by stress patterns, as indicated by increased lexical decision latencies to incorrectly stressed word and nonword stimuli. The data for the LHD patients revealed an effect of stress for real word targets only, whereas the reaction time data for the RHD patients as a group showed no significant influence of stress pattern. However, there was a great deal of individual variability in performance. The latency and error rate findings suggest that LHD patients and non-brain-damaged individuals are both sensitive to lexical stress in word recognition, but the LHD patients are more likely to treat incorrectly stressed items as nonwords. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic processing and the role of lexical stress in word recognition.
Does impaired grammatical comprehension provide evidence
for an innate grammar module?
Authors: NORBURY COURTENAY FRAZIER , BISHOP DOROTHY V. M. , BRISCOE JOSIE
Published: November 2002

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have distinctive impairments in the comprehension of sentences that involve long-distance syntactic relationships. This has been interpreted as evidence for impairment in an innate grammatical module. An alternative theory attributes such difficulties to lower level problems with speech perception or deficits in phonological working memory. These theoretical accounts were contrasted using comprehension data from three subgroups: 20 children with SLI, 19 children with mild–moderate hearing loss, and normally developing children matched on age and/or language level. There were close similarities between the hearing-impaired and SLI groups on a measure of phoneme perception. Children with SLI did poorly on tests assessing knowledge of Binding principles and in assigning thematic roles in passive sentences whereas hearing-impaired children performed close to control levels, indicating that poor speech perception cannot account for this pattern of deficit. However, the pattern of errors on syntactic tasks and the relatively weak correlation between different indicators of syntactic deficit seemed incompatible with a modular hypothesis. We propose that limited processing capacity is the principal determinant of deficient syntactic comprehension in SLI.
Letter names: Effect on letter saying, spelling, and word recognition in Hebrew
Authors: LEVIN IRIS , PATEL SIGAL , MARGALIT TAMAR , BARAD NOA
Published: November 2002

Letter names bridge the gap between oral and written language among English speaking children. This study examined whether letter names have a similar function in Hebrew. Despite their common historical source, Hebrew letter names differ from English: they are longer and not as regular phonologically. However, they follow the acrophonic principle, unlike many English letter names. Israeli kindergartners, whose mother tongue was Hebrew, were asked to orally provide initial or final letters of spoken words, to spell words in writing, and to select one written word out of two as standing for an oral word. First graders were tested on orally providing the initial letter and spelling. Children were found to rely on letter names in performing all these tasks. They succeeded more in providing the initial letter or in spelling it if the word started with a letter-name sequence, like kaftor (button), which is spelled with k (Kaf). They succeeded more in selecting the correct word between two if the words started with a letter-name sequence. In grade 1 the effects decreased and became limited particularly to phonemes spelled with homophonic letters. Partial letter names (impossible in English) affected performance but to a lesser extent than entire names. Reliance on letter names both facilitated and impaired performance but in different ways than in English. The educational implications are discussed.
Alternative approaches to analyzing individual differences in the rate of early vocabulary development
Authors: BAUER DANIEL J. , GOLDFIELD BEVERLY A. , REZNICK J. STEVEN
Published: November 2002

This paper examines individual differences in the rate of early lexical development with a specific interest in gender differences. Twenty-six children were assessed monthly from either 8, 9, or 10 months of age through 14 months of age, using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Gestures. Individual differences in developmental trajectories of vocabulary comprehension and production were explored using two analytic approaches. The first involved traditional parametric statistics, while the latter utilized classification procedures. Both techniques demonstrated that the lexical development of girls outpaced that of boys. The inductive approach also revealed the presence of distinctive “fast” and “slow” trajectories for both comprehension and production that were not exclusively segregated by gender. Cases exhibiting fast trajectories were predominantly girls, but several boys also followed this developmental pattern. The opposite pattern emerged for the slow trajectories. There was strong correspondence between production and comprehension, but a few cases clustered into the fast development group on one measure and the slow group on the other. The identification of these outliers may offer an important tool for exploring mechanisms of language development. Validation of the clustering results was based on the prospective prediction of an external criterion variable, namely, lexical development at 21 months, and by replication on an independent sample.
Differentiating language contact phenomena: Evidence from Korean–English bilingual children
Authors: SHIN SARAH J.
Published: November 2002

This paper attempts to provide a reliable description of the characteristics of intrasentential language mixing produced by a group a Korean–English bilingual children, with a special focus on the distinction between code switching and borrowing. Making use of the inherent variability in case marking in Korean, this study employs a quantitative variationist method to determine the status of single nouns of English origin in an otherwise Korean discourse, which constitute the largest portion of the bilingual data. Analysis of the overall bilingual data suggests that intrasentential language mixing is determined by the bilingual abilities and preferences of the speaker as well as those of the addressee. The results of the variable analysis of case marking show that most of the English-origin objects and subjects of Korean verbs are best treated as borrowings and not as code switches.
Individual differences in the integration of information from context and word parts in interpreting unknown kanji words
Authors: MORI YOSHIKO
Published: November 2002

This study examines individual differences in the ability to integrate information from word parts and context in interpreting novel kanji compounds (i.e., words consisting of two or more Chinese characters). To account for different approaches that students take to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words, the study also investigates the relationship between students' beliefs about the effectiveness of using kanji and/or contextual clues and their abilities to use the clue(s). A total of 74 English-speaking college students learning Japanese inferred the meanings of unknown compounds consisting of familiar characters under three conditions (words in isolation, contextual clues only, and both). The effects of the two sources appeared additive when examined across all participants. Further analysis, however, indicated that nearly half the students did not combine the two sources and overrelied on either kanji or contextual clues. The inability to integrate information and overreliance on kanji clues modestly but statistically significantly correlated with belief in the efficacy of an integration strategy. The combined effect of multiple sources of information, therefore, must be interpreted in terms of individual differences.
Word parsing by late-learning French–English bilinguals
Authors: GOLATO PETER
Published: November 2002

Previous research conducted with early learning French–English bilinguals suggests that, at the individual word level, the development of segmentation is best characterized in terms of a parameter-setting theory of language acquisition in which French segmentation is marked relative to English segmentation. The present study, which is conducted with late learning French–English bilinguals, finds evidence for parameter setting but with a directionality of markedness opposite that found by others. Support in favor of these findings is discussed.
Examining the nature of lexical processing in children with specific language impairment: Temporal processing or processing capacity deficit?
Authors: MONTGOMERY JAMES W.
Published: November 2002

The real-time lexical processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined, and the focus was to determine whether a temporal processing deficit or a general processing capacity deficit disrupts these children's lexical processing. A group of SLI children (mean age 8;3), a group of age-matched children (CA, mean age 8;1), and a group of receptive syntax-matched children (RS; mean age 6;7) completed a sentence processing task in which they monitored sentences for a target word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of sentences. Sentences systematically varied with respect to containing either a high proportion of stop consonants (stop-loaded sentences) or a high proportion of nonstop consonants (nonstop-loaded sentences). Children also completed the Identification (ID) Speech Perception Task. On the sentence processing task, SLI children yielded significantly slower word recognition reaction time (RT) overall than both CA and RS controls. Sentence type had no effect on any subject group's RT. No Group × Sentence Type interaction was found. On the ID task, SLI children performed significantly worse than CA controls but similarly to RS children. No correlation was found between temporal processing and lexical processing (for either sentence type or sentences combined) for any group. The findings are interpreted to suggest that a general processing capacity limitation was responsible for the poor ID task performance and slower lexical processing of SLI children.
Literacy in African American communities. J. L. Harris, A. G. Kamhi, and K. E. Pollock (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Pp. 310.
Authors: Adger Carolyn Temple
Published: November 2002

The beauty of edited volumes is their potential to achieve synergism in bringing together diverse work on a significant topic – not just to create a coherent collection of research. Literacy in African American communities succeeds on all fronts. In presenting a broad view of literacy-related practices, the volume evokes a variable African American community that is invisible (or at least hazy) in many schools. Without deep knowledge of the linguistic, cultural, historical, and political contexts for literacy in the community, the schools and university programs that prepare professionals cannot hope to overcome the deficit perspective of cultural and linguistic differences that still drives assessment and instruction to a large degree.
The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk: Vol. 1. Transcription format and programs; Vol. 2. The database (3rd ed.). B. MacWhinney. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000. Pp. 366 (Vol. 1); Pp. 418 (Vol. 2).
Authors: Beals Diane E.
Published: November 2002

Since the late 1980s, the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) has defined the state of the art of collection, analysis, archiving, and data sharing of transcriptions of children's language. Starting from scratch in 1987, Brian MacWhinney, along with many other leaders in child language, developed highly useful tools for the computerization of transcripts and their analysis. I have used the transcription conventions and analysis programs since 1989 and have seen the system evolve from a simple DOS-based program to one that handles much broader and more complex analyses within more user-friendly Windows and Macintosh platforms. This latest (third) edition of the manual that accompanies the CHILDES system reflects a more stable version of the Conventions for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) and Child Language Analysis (CLAN) programs than prior editions, which felt like works in progress. This version is written as a finished product with procedures and programs that have settled down into stable patterns of operation.
Children's language: Developing narrative and discourse competence (Vol. 10). Keith E. Nelson, Ayhan Aksu-Koc, and Carolyn E. Johnson. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Pp. 163.
Authors: Beals Diane E.
Published: November 2002

The highly regarded Children's Language series continues in 2001 with two new volumes, 10 and 11 (Nelson, Aksu-Koc, & Johnson, 2001, Vol. 11). Under the able leadership of Keith Nelson (who has edited all but two volumes), each volume since 1978 has represented current topics in research on child language; and the series provides a comprehensive overview of the history and progression of the study of language development over the past two and a half decades. Since Volume 7, the papers included in the series were chosen from the range of presentations at the meetings of the International Association of the Study of Child Language, which bring together researchers from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, North and South America, and Africa. Prior to Volume 7, articles in each volume also represented an international scope.
Children with specific language impairment. Laurence B. Leonard. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. 339.
Authors: Hewitt Lynne E.
Published: November 2002

Laurence Leonard is one of the most prolific and well-respected researchers in the area of specific language impairment (SLI) in children, and he is well qualified to write a book surveying the topic. SLI is a disorder of unknown origin, which appears to have a genetic component, causing delays and disorders of language development in children of normal nonverbal intelligence with no significant medical, emotional, or sensory deficits. The primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive review of research in the field of SLI, and Leonard has the minute knowledge necessary to succeed at the task. The coverage in the book reaches back to the earliest nineteenth-century descriptions of children who fit the profile and then moves forward quickly to the massive literature that has accumulated on the topic in the last 20 years. Following the introductory historical and definitional section, Leonard goes on to describe the nature of the linguistic impairment in SLI, including important cross-linguistic accounts and nonlinguistic cognitive issues. The book also covers hypotheses of causation, in a “nature versus nurture” section, and clinical issues of assessment and intervention. Part V, on theory, may be of most interest to psycholinguists who are not language disorders specialists. Overall, there is no doubt that this book is both an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with SLI and a welcome overview and resource for experts. Leonard's knowledge is encyclopedic, his presentation erudite, and his grasp of detail unfailingly impressive.
ASYMPTOTIC THEORY OF STATISTICAL INFERENCE FOR TIME
SERIES
Authors: Lieberman Offer
Published: November 2002

Modern time series econometrics involves a diversity of models.
In addition to the more traditional vector autoregressive (VAR)
and autoregressive moving average (ARMA) systems, cointegration
and unit root models are in widespread use for macroeconomic
data, nonlinear and non-Gaussian models are popular for financial
data, and long memory models are becoming more common in both
macroeconomic and financial applications. Much econometric thought
relates to issues of estimation and hypothesis testing, and
so, in the absence of a usable finite sample theory (as is the
case for the models just mentioned), an enormous amount of effort
has been given to developing adequate asymptotics for statistical
inference. There is often a lag between the introduction of
a new model and the development of an asymptotic theory. In
consequence, applied econometricians sometimes have to estimate
time series models for which no asymptotic theory is available.
For instance, multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional
heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models have been in use in empirical
research for a while, and practitioners have been using asymptotic
normality of estimators in this model even though a theoretical
justification is not available.