bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal effects of manual English instruction on deaf children’s morphological skills
Authors: Gaustad Martha Gonter
Published: December 2008

This study examined the imitation, comprehension, and production of twelve morphological features by groups of deaf subjects who were instructed through manually coded English. Their performances were compared with those of hearing subjects and also with their own follow-up scores from three years later. Results showed early deficits in the English skills of deaf subjects but steady improvement of scores on all tasks over time. Initially, subjects’ age predicted only imitation performance while time in an MCE program predicted production performance in addition to imitation. But neither age nor time in program was a significant predictor of any performance at the time of follow-up. Implications for intervention with manual English codes are discussed.
Effects of training on fricative identification in toddlers
Authors: Griffiths Scott K. , Johnson Cynthia J.
Published: December 2008

Researchers who have attempted to relate phonemic identification in young children to their productive performance have met with little success. The failure to do so may reflect the difficulty of the task and uncontrolled stimulus familiarity. Fricative perception was investigated in toddlers using repeated tests to control for these factors. Each subject was tested on two contrasts, one the child produced distinctly in an imitation task and one the child produced as similar syllables. The final perceptual results were well matched to productive distinctiveness. Performance on the identification task over time is considered in terms of the relation between perception and production, the methodology, and competition at the phonological level in the learning of new words.
Phonological awareness in illterates: Observations from Serbo-Croatian
Authors: Lukatela Katerina , Carello Claudia , Shankweiler Donald , Liberman Isabelle Y.
Published: December 2008

Adult illiterate and semiliterate speakers of Serbo-Croatian were assessed on reading, writing, phonological, and control tasks. Most subjects had acquired measurable literacy skills despite a documented lack of formal instruction. The individual differences in these skills were highly specific. They were related to measures of phoneme segmentation and alphabet knowledge, but only weakly related to general cognitive abilities. Three groups, categorized with respect to the subjects' ability to identify the letters of their Cyrillic alphabet, differed on phoneme deletion and phoneme-counting tasks, but not on syllable-counting, picture vocabulary, or tone-counting tasks. Alphabet knowledge was more tightly coupled with phoneme awareness than has been found in speakers of English. Cross-language similarities and differences are discussed, highlighting the role that phonological transparency of the orthography may play in the acquisition of literacy.
The study of language loss: Models and hypotheses for an emerging discipline
Authors: Pan Barbara Alexander , Gleason Jean Berko
Published: December 2008

The study of language acquisition has enjoyed a robust history in recent years, with the advent of developmental psycholinguistics as a separate field, and with much attention to bilingualism and the acquisition of second languages by both children and adults. The loss of language skills by individual speakers has, by contrast, been a little researched area, with the exception of the field of aphasiology, which has developed roughly parallel with modern psycholinguistics. Typical situations in which language skills may be lost occur when an individual speaker of a language moves to an area where another language is dominant; when an ethnolinguistic minority child enters school and adopts the societal language; when a second language is no longer studied or needed; when a local language drops out of use and its speakers must adopt a more dominant language. As they grow older, young children appear to lose some language-related skills, such as the ability to make fine phonetic discriminations (see Burnham, this issue) and aging adults lose some language skills they once had.
Parental speech to middle- and working-class children from two racial groups in three settings
Authors: Lawrence Valerie W. , Shipley Elizabeth F.
Published: December 2008

The speech of 9 middle-class black, 9 middle-class white, 9 working-class black, and 9 workingclass white parents to their preschool children was examined during picture identification, free play, and a meal. The groups were found to be similar in the level and form of parental labeling. The groups differed in the information the parents supplied about objects in the various settings, in the parent's direction of the child's behavior, and in parental sensitivity to the child's age. Within the working-class groups, the frequency of vernacular features in the parents' speech correlated with the quality of information they provided.
The effects of early bilingual schooling on first language skills
Authors: Harley Birgit , Hart Douglas , Lapkin Sharon
Published: December 2008

In this study, the development of first language (L1) skills among native English-speaking students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canadian schools is explored. It is hypothesized that the early bilingual schooling received by those majority children will serve to enhance their performance on various kinds of L1 tasks. Some preliminary evidence consistent with this hypothesis is found in a longitudinal comparison of English language test scores obtained over a six-year period by 22 immersion students and 22 regular English program students. Analysis of specific test items where the immersion students clearly outperform their regular program counterparts leads to the development of more specific hypotheses, which are tested via new measures on a larger sample of students in grade 6.
The functions of imitation in child language
Authors: Réger Zita
Published: December 2008

Earlier studies demonstrating the discourse function of imitation have been inconclusive for methodological reasons. In the present study three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs are analysed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Examination of the types of modification introduced by the children revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies. As development progressed, questions were imitated significantly more often than nonquestions. The children's selection from multiword utterances showed convergence on a language specific discourse rule. Imitation served (i)lexical learning, (ii) the phonological approximation of adult word forms, and (iii)grammatical learning, in this temporal order. The high rate of grammatically and lexically progressive items in the earliest sample was attributed to nonselective echolalia, supposedly a genetically earlier form of imitation.
Levels of representation in verbal number production
Authors: Sokol Scott M. , Mccloskey Michael
Published: December 2008

This article reports a single case study of a brain-damaged subject who presented with impaired performance on tasks involving production of verbal numbers (i.e., numbers in the form of words, such as eighty-six). Lexical errors occurred in spoken production but not in written production. Syntactic errors, however, occurred in both production modes. This pattern of performance provides empirical support for assumptions about the componential structure of the normal number processing system.
Relations of digit naming speed with three components of reading
Authors: Spring Carl , Davis John M.
Published: December 2008

The goal of the present investigation was to identify the reading processes that are impaired in children whose digit naming speeds are slow. Continuous digit naming speed was assumed to measure the automaticity with which character codes may be accessed in memory, and the automaticity of this process was assumed to be a prerequisite for the accurate performance of higher level reading processes. In Study I it was found, for children in grades 1 through 3, that digit naming speed was reliably correlated with reading of both irregularly spelled words and pronounceable nonsense words, and that most of the variance shared by irregular-word and nonsense-word reading was accounted for by digit naming speed. These results were interpreted as evidence that character-identification automaticity is equally important to the direct-access and speech-recoding routes of word recognition. Models of how character-identification automaticity might affect each of these routes are discussed. In Study 2 it was found, for children in grades 4 through 10, that the correlation of digit naming speed with reading comprehension was significantly smaller than its correlation with word recognition, and that the former correlation was completely accounted for when either WISC-R verbal IQ or word-recognition accuracy was controlled. These results are contrasted with comparable results reported by other investigators, and methodological differences are noted.
The language patterns mothers and fathers employ with their autistic boys and girls
Authors: Konstantareas M. Mary , Mandel Lisa , Homatidis Soula
Published: December 2008

The special features of speech addressed to autistic children by their mothers and fathers were examined in an effort to clarify how the child's level of functioning influenced parental language style. A total of 12 children, 6 boys and 6 girls, half of whom were higher functioning and verbal and the remainder lower functioning and nonverbal, were videotaped in a 15-minute interaction with their mothers and fathers. The total number of utterances used was comparable for mothers and fathers, but mothers employed shorter mean lengths of utterance and more prompts to elicit speech or motoric activity when their children were lower functioning and nonverbal than when they were higher functioning and verbal. The higher functioning, verbal children were more frequently reinforced for speech, while the lower functioning, nonverbal children were more likely to be given indirect directives. Fathers issued direct directives more frequently than mothers, while mothers were more likely to employ prompts to stimulate their children's speech, particularly when they were lower functioning. Thus, both mothers and fathers of autistic children appear to be sensitive to their child's particular presenting characteristics, but differ in how they accommodate to them.
The learnability of the alphabetic principle: Children's initial hypotheses about how print represents spoken language
Authors: Byrne Brian
Published: December 2008

This research examines the hypotheses about how print represents the speech that preliterate children select when they receive input compatible with several such hypotheses. In Experiment 1, preschoolers were taught to readhatandhatsandbookandbooks. Then, in generalization tests, they were probed for what they had learned about the letters. All of the children were able to transfer to other plurals (e.g., to decide thatbikessaid “bikes” rather than “bike,” and thatdogsaid “dog” and not “dogs”), but only those who knew the sound of the letter s prior to the experiment were able to decide, for example, thatbussaid “bus” and not “bug.” The failure to detect the phonemic value of s on the part of alphabetically naive children was replicated in Experiments 2, 3, and 4, which instituted a variety of controls. In Experiment 5, it was found that, although preschoolers who had been taught to read pairs of words distinguished by the comparative affixer(such assmall/smaller) were able to generalize to other comparatives (e.g.,mean/meaner), they could not generalize to pairs whereerhad no morphemic value (e.g.,corn/corner). A similar failure by alphabetically naive children to detect the syllabic, as compared with the morphemic, status of the superlative affixestwas found in Experiment 6. Overall, the results indicate that most preliterate children fail to select phonologically based hypotheses, even when these are available in the input. Instead, they focus on morphophonology and/or semantic aspects of words' referents. The research is couched in terms of the Learnability Theory (LT) (Gold, 1967), which provides a convenient framework for considering a series of interrelated questions about the acquisition of literacy. In particular, it is argued that if the data available to the child includes the pronunciation of written words, the alphabetic principle may be unlearnable, given the hypothesis selection procedures identified in these experiments.
List learning of second language vocabulary
Authors: Griffin Gerry , Harley Trevor A.
Published: December 2008

The learning of second language vocabulary in lists of word pairs is a widespread practice. A basic practical question in this respect is whether it is more effective for nonfluent bilinguals to learn word pairs in first language–second language order (Ll–L2), or vice versa. To date, experimental psychology has not given a clear answer to this question, partly because it has not addressed the relevant issues directly. This article reviews some aspects of psychology that are relevant to L2 vocabulary list learning and reports on an experiment conducted with comprehensive (high) school students, aged 11–13, who were learning French. The experiment examined the presentation of vocabulary items to be learned. It was found that presenting items in L1–L2 order was the more versatile form of presentation if both production and comprehension of L2 items were required on the part of the learner. The theoretical implications of the findings, relating to the structure of the bilingual lexicon, are also discussed.
Language choice and functional differentiation of languages in bilingual parent–child reading
Authors: Vedder Paul , Kook Hetty , Muysken Pieter
Published: December 2008

Language choice and functional differentiation between Papiamento and Dutch were studied in bilingual parent-child reading sessions in Antillian migrant families; the subjects, who were living in the Netherlands, were to some extent bilingual in Papiamento and Dutch. Mothers were asked to read three picture books to their child: one in Dutch, one in Papiamento, and one without text. Code choice was related to the text and contents of the book, as well as to restrictions imposed by the language proficiency in both languages of the mothers and children. It was expected that Dutch would be used more for more demanding cognitive functions because of its association with school. However, these parents did not categorize rnetalinguistic activity and reasoning as school-related, although they did categorize counting as such and tended to use Dutch to count.
Index of Productive Syntax
Authors: Scarborough Hollis S.
Published: December 2008

A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.
Toward understanding the problem in severely disabled readers Part 1: Vowel errors
Authors: Bryson Susan E. , Werker Janet F.
Published: December 2008

This experiment examined the vowel responses of severely disabled readers and normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. The disabled readers were divided into three groups based on their relative Verbal and Performance IQs. Following the rationale of Fowler, Shankweiler, and Liberman (1979), vowel responses were classified as incorrect or correct. Correctness was determined according to either context-free or context-dependent criteria. The main finding was that the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. However, disabled readers with higher Performance than Verbal IQs made significantly more context-free responses and significantly fewer context-dependent responses than all other groups. Moreover, knowledge of how speech is segmented at the phonemic level predicted performance on the reading task. The findings suggest that disabled readers employ very local (context-independent) strategies in reading; these findings are discussed in terms of the idea that disabled readers suffer a basic deficit in phonological processing (Liberman, Liberman, & Mattingly, 1980) or linguistic processing (Siegel & Ryan, 1984).
The measurement of bilingualism and its relationship to cognitive ability
Authors: Lemmon Christian R. , Goggin Judith P.
Published: December 2008

The present experiments explored various measures of English and Spanish language ability and compared monolingual and bilingual subjects on tests of cognitive skill. Language ability was assessed in Experiment 1. These measures were found to be highly correlated with each other, with at least two factors needed to describe the associations among the tests in each language. In Experiment 2, subjects were given tests of cognitive skill. To be included in this study, all subjects were required to show adequate understanding of English and were divided into monolingual and bilingual groups on the basis of their Spanish abilities. Monolinguals scored higher than bilinguals on most of the measures of cognitive skill, but subsequent comparisons of the monolinguals with high and low bilingual subgroups suggested that the differences were attributable to those subjects characterized as low bilinguals.
Language learnability and specific language impairment in children
Authors: Leonard Laurence B.
Published: December 2008

Theories of language learnability have focused on “normal” language development, but there is a group of children, termed “specifically language-impaired,” for whom these theories are also appropriate. These children present an interesting learnability problem because they develop language slowly, the intermediate points in their development differ in certain respects from the usual developmental stages, and they do not always achieve the adult level of language functioning. In this article, specifically language-impaired children are treated as normal learners dealing with an input that is distorted in principled ways. When the children are viewed from this perspective, Pinker's (1984) theory can account for many of the features of their language.
Preschool children's explorations of letters in their own names
Authors: Villaume Susan Kidd , Wilson Lavisa Cam
Published: December 2008

Preschool children's early understanding of letters was explored using literacy events focusing on name. Five tasks were designed to elicit information about children's conceptualizations of letters in their own names. Responses were analyzed descriptively to determine general patterns. Children were then clustered into strategy groups. These groups provided a basis for a developmental description. Children's own names proved to be a unique source for creating and testing hypotheses concerning letters due to frequent exposure to both the printed script and the oral script (the spelling of name). This exploration was marked by several major transitions: a movement from a unidimensional conceptualization of letters to a multidimensional conceptualization; a movement from general principles to an assimilation of specific knowledge regarding the principles; and a movement from independent explorations of the printed and oral scripts to integration of the two scripts.
The acquisition of English articles by first- and second-language learners
Authors: Thomas Margaret
Published: December 2008

Child first-language (L1) learners frequently use the definite article in referential indefinite contexts, that is, with nouns appearing in the discourse for the first time, where adults use the indefinite article. Adult second-language (L2) learners also overgeneralize the definite article. Research reported here shows 30 L2 learners usethein referential indefinite contexts at significantly higher rates than in nonreferential contexts. Thus, both L1 and L2 learners may share an initial hypothesis associatingthewith referential nouns. This evidence of a strategy common to L1 and L2 learners invites reinterpretation of both L1 and L2 acquisition data.
Order of words, signs, and gestures: A first comparison
Authors: Laudanna Alessandro , Volterra Virginia
Published: December 2008

The present study evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The same picture description task was given to 12 hearing subjects using spoken Italian, 12 deaf subjects using Italian Sign Language, and 12 hearing subjects using pantomime. Nonreversible, reversible, and locative productions with two elements were elicited. The results showed that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. The pattern of similarities and differences found among the three experimental conditions allows us to argue that the order of signs in the sentence is sensitive to modality as well as linguistic factors depending on the particular sentence structures considered.
Solitary sound play during acquisition of English vocalizations by an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus): Possible parallels with children’s monologue speech
Authors: Pepperberg Irene M. , Brese Katherine J. , Harris Barbara J.
Published: December 2008

An African Grey parrot, Alex, who had learned to use English speech in studies on referential interspecies communication and animal cognition, produced English monologues in both the presence and absence of human receivers. This study examines one component of Alex’s monologue behavior, private speech, while he was being taught new vocalizations. His private speech during those time periods included a small percentage of novel utterances, not yet used in the presence of his caretakers, that were phonologically related to, but not exact reproductions of, the new vocalizations. His monologues also contained utterances that were part of the general daily routine as well as the specific training paradigm, but rarely included verbatim reproductions of the training scenario. Alex’s behaviors were comparable to those of children in the early stages of language acquisition. Because monologue behavior has been characterized as a form of practice that facilitates human language development, the data are discussed in terms of the possible functions of monologues during Alex’s acquisition of novel vocalizations.
Automatic phonetic transfer in bidialectal reading
Authors: Lam Agnes S. L. , Perfetti Charles A. , Bell Laura
Published: December 2008

This study investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script – Chinese. Since the Chinese ideographic script can be read with more than one dialectal pronunciation, a reader who has learned to read in two dialects will have two pronunciations for the same word stored in his memory. Thus, interference effects will occur. Sixteen subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese were tested in a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words that were pronounced the same or differently in one or both of the dialects. That automatic phonetic activation would occur even for an ideographic script such as Chinese was supported by the results.
The relation of utterance length to grammatical complexity in normal and language-disordered groups
Authors: Scarborough Hollis S. , Rescorla Leslie , Tager-Flusberg Helen , Fowler Anne E. , Sudhalter Vicki
Published: December 2008

Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes was examined as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) served as the measure of syntactic and morphological proficiency. For all groups, a strong curvilinear association between measures was found across the MLU range from 1.0 to about 4.5. Correlations were weaker when MLU exceeded 3.0 than during earlier stages of language development, however, confirming previous suggestions that MLU becomes less closely associated with grammatical development as linguistic proficiency increases. For the language-disordered groups, moreover, the curves relating the two measures differed from the curves for the normal preschoolers because MLU frequently overestimated actual IPSyn scores. The results are discussed with respect to the use of MLU in conjunction with other measures of syntactic complexity in the study of atypical language development.
Phonological analysis as a function of age and exposure to reading instruction
Authors: Bowey Judith A. , Francis J.
Published: December 2008

This study was designed to test the prediction that, whereas sensitivity to subsyllabic phonological units might emerge prior to alphabetic reading instruction, phonemic analysis skills develop as a consequence of reading instruction. A series of phonological oddity tasks was devised, assessing children's sensitivity to subsyllabic onset and rime units, and to phonemes. These tasks were administered to three groups of children. The first group comprised the oldest children of a sample of kindergarten children. The second and third groups comprised the youngest and oldest children from a first-grade sample. The kindergarten group was equivalent to the younger first-grade group in terms of general verbal maturity, but had not been exposed to reading instruction. The younger first-grade sample was verbally less mature than the older first-grade sample, but had equivalent exposure to reading instruction. On all tasks, both first-grade groups performed at equivalent levels, and both groups did better than the kindergarten group. In all groups, onset and rime unity oddity tasks were of equal difficulty, but phoneme oddity tasks were more difficult than rime oddity tasks. Although some of the kindergarten children could reliably focus on onset and rime units, none performed above chance on the phoneme oddity tasks. Further analyses indicated that rime/onset oddity performance explained variation in very early reading achievement more reliably than phoneme oddity performance.
Onset/rime sensitivity and orthographic analogies in normal and poor readers
Authors: Greaney Keith T. , Tunmer William E.
Published: December 2008

This study was designed to determine whether there was a relationship between the ease with which children make use of orthographic analogies and their progress in learning to read. The results of an experiment using a reading age match design showed that poor readers performed as well as normal readers on orally presented measures of onset/rime sensitivity, but less well on visually/orally presented rhyme tasks. The poor readers also performed less well than the normal readers on a task that measured the children's ability to take advantage of analogical units when reading lists of words: these reading lists contained groups of words that differed according to (1) whether the words containing the common unit were presented contiguously or noncontiguously, and (2) whether the unit constituted the rime portion of the words or was embedded within the rime portion of the words. A follow-up intervention study demonstrated that poor readers who received instruction in the use of orthographic analogies achieved higher reading accuracy scores on subsequent readings than did a matched group of poor readers who received standard remedial instruction in context cue usage.
Changes in processing adverbial conjuncts throughout adulthood
Authors: Bloom Ronald L. , Mullin Jeanne , Paternostro Peter J.
Published: December 2008

This study examines the use and understanding of concordant (e.g., consequently, moreover) and discordant (e.g., rather, contrastively) adverbial conjuncts in the later part of the life span. The participants, 75 neurologically healthy young (mean age 21.8), middle-aged (mean age 51.7), and elderly (mean age 73.1) adults, were examined using procedures by Nippold, Schwarz, and Undlin (1992). Groups were matched for education level. The results indicate a significant decline in processing adverbial conjuncts in the elderly. Discordant adverbial conjuncts especially challenged the linguistic processing abilities of the elderly subjects. The age- related decline in processing adverbial conjuncts.appears to be a specific deficit in linguistic processing that is independent of problems in memory or the effects of exposure to sophisticated language forms.
Bilingual and monolingual children's use of two lexical acquisition heuristics
Authors: Merriman William E. , Kutlesic Vesna
Published: December 2008

Children's heuristics for word learning have been the focus of much research, but little is known about bilinguals' and monolinguals' comparative use of them. In this study, 36 Serbian/ English bilinguals and 42 English monolinguals, who were between 5 and 8 years old and lived in the same neighborhoods in the United States, received a successive name training assessment of two heuristics: criterial use of highlighted features and preservation of mutual exclusivity. Older children employed both heuristics more often than younger ones. Monolinguals were more likely than bilinguals to interpret a highlighted feature as a necessary condition for applying a new English object name, but the groups did not differ in their tendency to maintain mutual exclusivity between the extensions of two novel English labels.
Comments “On Rhyme, language, and children's reading”
Authors: Bryant Peter , Maclean Morag , Bradley Lynette
Published: December 2008

Judith Bowey's constructive comments on our article seem to us to be as good an example of the advantages of dialogue in research as one could hope to find. We agree with many of her comments, and we are pleased with her further analysis of some of our data. In fact, we have very little to add and would only like to clarify a few points.
Learning disabled children's conversational competence: responses to inadequate messages
Authors: Donahue Mavis , Pearl Ruth , Bryan Tanis
Published: December 2008

This study examined learning disabled children's understanding of conversational rules for initiating the repair of a communicative breakdown. Learning disabled and normal children in grades 1 through 8 played the listener role in a referential communication task requiring them to select referents based on messages varying in informational adequacy. Learning disabled children were less likely to request clarification of inadequate messages and, consequently, made fewer correct referent choices than normal children. Only young learning disabled girls were less able than their normal age-mates to appraise message adequacy. Analyses of response latencies and request type also suggest that the failure to request clarification cannot be attributed solely to linguistic deficits. Results are discussed in terms of the relative contributions of syntactic-semantic ability and social knowledge to conversational competence.
The communicative competence of mildly retarded adults
Authors: Abbeduto Leonard , Rosenberg Sheldon
Published: December 2008

This study examined the communicative behavior of mildly retarded adults engaged in conversation with peers. Contemporary models of pragmatic interaction were applied to samples of triadic naturally occurring conversation. The subjects made few errors in turn-taking; moreover, the rule system involved was consistent with that posited for nonretarded adults. They recognized those illocutionary acts that obligated them to respond as well as the specific responses required. That they were actively involved in information exchange was indicated by the observation that the majority of their turns were responses to the preceding turns of others, even when under no obligation to respond. Individual differences on most measures were observed, and the measures appeared related to each other, but not to IQ. Unexpectedly, the subjects produced few indirect speech acts.
Beginning to read in Turkish: A phonologically transparent orthography
Authors: Öney Banu , Durgunoğlu Aydin Yücesan
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this study was to investigate early literacy acquisition in a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences. It was considered that Turkish, with its systematic phonological and orthographic structure, would make different demands on the beginning reader than the languages used in many of the previous studies of literacy acquisition. First grade children were assessed using tests of phonological awareness, letter recognition, word and pseudoword recognition, spelling, syntactic awareness, and listening comprehension at the beginning of the school year. The impact of these factors on the development of word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension was examined. The results strongly suggest that a phonologically transparent orthography fosters the early development of word recognition skills, and that phonological awareness contributes to word recognition in the early stages of reading acquisition. Once the children's word recognition performance is high, listening comprehension ability distinguishes the different levels of reading comprehension among children. These patterns of results were interpreted as reflecting the phonological and orthographic characteristics of the Turkish language and orthography.
Young children's acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs: Parental report findings
Authors: Siedlecki Theodore , Bonvillian John D.
Published: December 2008

The acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined longitudinally in nine young children of deaf parents. In monthly home visit sessions, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed the different signs in their lexicons. According to these parental reports, handshapes were produced accurately in 49.8% of the children's different signs. Accuracy of handshape production typically improved with the children's increasing age and vocabulary size. Four basic handshapes (/5, G, B, A/) predominated in the children's early sign productions. Measures of the children's handshape production accuracy, ordinal position of initial production, and frequency of production were used to describe the order in which handshapes were most often acquired. It was also observed that the part of the hand involved in contacting a sign's location often affected the accuracy of the handshapes being produced.
The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants
Authors: Pearson Barbara Z. , Fernandez Sylvia C. , Lewedeg Vanessa , Oller D.Kimbrough
Published: December 2008

The bilingual child is seen as a unique source of information about the relation between input and intake. The strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning was examined for 25 simultaneous bilingual infants (ages 8 to 30 months) with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, standardized parent report forms in English and Spanish, the percentage of all words that were known in each language was calculated and then plotted against the estimates of language input (also in percentages). A significant correlation was found, r(25)= .82, p < .001. The correlation was also strong when examined point-by-point, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20%; between observations, although it was not reliable at lower levels of exposure to Spanish. Especially for children with less input in the minority language, the factors which appeared to affect the strength of the association between input and amount learned in a language are discussed.
Spoken word recognition in children with and without specific language impairment
Authors: Dollaghan Chris
Published: December 2008

Deficits in lexical access in children with specific language impairments (SLI) have been inferred from word naming, recall, and categorization tasks, but no evidence exists concerning these children's ability to identify words in spoken input. We presented successive auditory time gatings of unfamiliar words; familiar, phonologically related words; and familiar, phonologically unrelated words to school-age children with and without SLI. The groups did not differ significantly in the point at which they recognized familiar words, but the subjects with SLI required significantly more of the acoustic-phonetic signal than did their peers to recognize unfamiliar words. For all word types, the subjects with SLI were significantly less likely to respond with correct initial consonants at the earliest gated interval than were their peers. Our results suggest that both representational and perceptual inefficiencies may contribute to slowed lexical access in children with SLI.
Scores on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory of children from lowand middle-income families
Authors: Arriaga Rose I. , Fenson Larry , Cronan Terry , Pethick Stephen J.
Published: December 2008

This study compared the language skills in a group of very low-income toddlers with those of a middle-income sample matched on age and sex. The assessment instrument was the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for toddlers, a parent report form. The scores for the low-income group were strikingly lower on the three key indices evaluated: size of expressive vocabulary, age of appearance of word combinations, and complexity of utterances. The entire lowincome distribution was shifted about 30% toward the lower end of the middle-income distribution for both productive vocabulary and grammatical development. The magnitude of these income/ social class effects was larger than reported in most prior reports for children in this age range. This finding underscores the cautionary note issued by the CDI developers, which states that the published CDI norms, based on a middle-class sample, may not be directly applicable to low-income samples.
Nonword repetitions of children with specific language impairment: Exploration of some explanations for their inaccuracies
Authors: Edwards Jan , Lahey Margaret
Published: December 2008

To examine possible explanations of the reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, we compared the repetitions of 54 children with SLI and their peers in terms of number and type of error as well as latency and duration of response. We found no evidence of differences between the groups in auditory discrimination or response processes, but we did find some evidence suggesting differences in either the formation or storage of phonological representations in working memory. Because repetition accuracy was significantly correlated with expressive, but not receptive, measures of language, we hypothesized that the problem lay with the nature of phonological representations in working memory and not with the ability to hold phonological information in working memory.
Hypotheses on the dissociation between “referential” and “modalizing” verbal behavior in aphasia
Authors: Nespoulous Jean-Luc , Code Chris , Virbel Jacques , Lecours André Roch
Published: December 2008

We develop the distinction between “referential” and “modalizing” aspects of language and describe their functional dissociation, as observed in various manifestations of aphasia and in the speech of hemispherectomy and commissurotomy patients. Such a frequently observable dissociation is taken to reflect certain cognitive and neurobiological distinctions that do not seem to be accounted for by the structurally motivated linguistic models currently utilized in neurolinguistic studies. The dissociation appears to generate fresh and original insights when applied to acquired language impairments.
Characteristics of developmental dyslexia in a regular writing system
Authors: Wimmer Heinz
Published: December 2008

The present study assessed reading difficulties and cognitive impairments of German-speaking dyslexic children at grade levels 2, 3, and 4. It was found that German dyslexic children suffered from a pervasive speed deficit for all types of reading tasks, including text, high frequency words, and pseudowords, but at the same time showed generally rather high reading accuracy. For pseudowords, reading refusals or word responses were absent, and the majority of errors was close to the target pronunciation. Reading speed seemed to be most impaired for pseudowords and function words that did not allow the children to take a short-cut from phonemically mediated word processing. The discussion offers a developmental framework for the interpretation of these reading difficulties. For the cognitive tasks, dyslexic children did not differ from age-matched control children on the pseudoword repetition task or the digit span task, indicating that auditory perception and memory were not impaired. On phonological awareness tasks (rhyme oddity detection, vowel substitution, and pseudoword spelling), dyslexic children scored lower than age-matched control children, but not lower than younger reading-level control children. The performance of the dyslexic children on the phonemic segmentation tasks (pseudoword spelling and vowel substitution) was high in absolute terms. In contrast, marked differences between dyslexic and age-matched controls were found on rapid naming tasks: dyslexic grade 4 children showed lower numeral-naming speed than reading-level grade 2 children. Numeral-naming speed turned out to be the most important predictor of reading speed differences. These findings are discussed in relation to the phonological impairment explanation of dyslexia and to recent alternative explanations that posit an underlying impairment in automatizing skills which demand the fast execution of low-level cognitive processes.
Because in children's discourse
Authors: Orsolini Margherita
Published: December 2008

This study explores the role of discourse functions in children's use of because (perchi). The disputes of 172 preschoolers were analyzed in terms of interactive move, argumentative strategies, and communicative acts. Occurrences of because were identified and described. Production of because by the same subjects in the context of teacher-children conversations was analyzed. Results showed that the causal connective tends to co-occur with justification acts and may work as a device that introduces new information and gives emphasis to the speaker's position without providing any reference to causes or motives. Besides working in this perhaps more basic way in discourse, because has the sentential function of linking events to conditions.
Phonological awareness in multilingual Chinese children
Authors: Rickard Liow Susan J. , Poon Kenneth K. L.
Published: December 2008

Phonological awareness has been shown to be important for early literacy development in unilingual readers of English. We investigated its impact in English and Mandarin for 57 multilingual pupils whose language backgrounds were English, Chinese (Mandarin/dialect), or Bahasa Indonesia, using a homophone decision task, an English lexicality spelling test, and a Hanyu Pinyin (romanised Mandarin) spelling test. All three groups of pupils were studying English and Mandarin in the same school, and so, somewhat unusually, the influence of their language background (especially script exposure) could be seen in the absence of differences in teaching strategies. In English, the results showed that a relationship between script exposure and phonological awareness develops in line with the orthographic depth hypothesis (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987). The Bahasa Indonesia group exhibited the highest levels of alphabetic phonological awareness, followed by the English group and then the Chinese group. In Mandarin, the pupils' performance on the Hanyu Pinyin spelling test suggested that tonal phonological awareness is relatively independent of alphabetic phonological awareness. It seems that language background can influence the nature and development of phonological awareness, and that this in turn may affect children's strategies for the subsequent acquisition of a second (or third) written language.
Communicative intent in late-talking toddlers
Authors: Rescorla Leslie , Merrin Lisa
Published: December 2008

This research investigated communicative intent in 31 toddlers who were slow to talk and 32 normally developing toddlers matched on SES, age, and nonverbal cognitive ability. Communicative intent was studied during free play, both with the mother and with an unfamiliar examiner. Late talkers had lower rates of communication, initiation, and joint attention, but when total communicativeness was controlled for, they were just as likely to initiate, respond, and maintain joint attention as were their peers. As expected, the late talkers relied more on nonword vocalization, gestures, and gesture/oral combinations than their normally developing peers. Children in both groups initiated much more with the examiner (who was instructed to be passive) than with their mothers. Finally, regression analysis suggested that intake expressive language delay severity was the best predictor of age 3 MLU and IPSyn language outcome in the late talkers. However, after expressive delay severity was accounted for, late talkers who were more interested in initiating communication and sustaining joint attention had worse outcomes than late talkers whose communicative drive was weaker, suggesting that they had a more severe underlying language dysfunction.
Theory of mind concepts in children's literature
Authors: Cassidy Kimberly Wright , Ball Lorraine V. , Rourke Mary T. , Werner Rebecca Stetson , Feeny Norah , Chu June Y. , Lutz Donna J. , Perkins Alexis
Published: December 2008

This study examined whether books that are typically read to preschool children contain theory of mind concepts. The parents of 47 preschool children recorded books read by or to their child over a one-week period. The books were analyzed for theory of mind content. It was found that 78% of the books contained internal state language, 34% contained false beliefs, and 43% contained personality descriptors. Thus, theory of mind concepts appear to be an integral part of the literature read to preschool children. These results are discussed in light of recent work on individual differences in theory of mind development.
Surface cues and the development of given/new interpretation
Authors: Chen Shu-Hui Eileen
Published: December 2008

As children develop language, they also acquire strategies to utilize surface forms to interpret the meaning and functions of sentences. This study investigated how Chinese-speaking children (aged 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13) and adults utilize structural and prosodic cues to interpret the pragmatic function of given and new information intrasententially. The results revealed that: (a) children did not utilize word order cues effectively in NVN sentences with normal stress; (b) children utilized the marked grammatical structure of passives and pseudoclefts more effectively than clefts; (c) when stress converged or competed with word order or syntactic structures, children responded nonuniformly; and (d) animacy was a factor that affected children's interpretation of given versus new. Interaction effects are discussed in light of the Competition Model.