bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of partial French immersion for children from different social class and ethnic backgrounds
Authors: Holobow Naomi E. , Genesee Fred , Lambert Wallace E. , Gastright Joseph , Met Myriam 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTA program of partial (half-day) French immersion in the Cincinnati Public Schools was evaluated in the kindergarten year. The English and French language development of participating native English-speaking children from both working and middle class backgrounds was assessed. The results indicated, firstly, that the pupils who spent half of their academic time in a foreign language (French) progressed just as well in English as carefully matched control pupils who followed a conventional all-English program. Secondly, it was found that socioeconomically underprivileged children (both black and white) benefited from an immersion-type introduction to a foreign language as much as pupils from middle class homes did. The degree of progress made in French was not linked with the social class background of the pupils even though this background factor clearly affected the students' performance on the English language tests. These results suggest that the immersion experience may help to diminish the effects of social class background.
Development in story writing
Authors: Freedman Aviva 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis study describes development in the realization of story structure in the written productions of schoolchildren at three grade levels (5, 8, and 12) when writing in two different modes: true stories and invented. The scripts analysed were randomly selected from the compositions produced by the entire population of the three grade levels in one Canadian Board (7,500 students). The instrument of analysis was based on the story grammar developed by Stein and Glenn (1979). The analysis revealed: (a) there is development by age in the degree of realization of an “ideal form” of story schema, that is, one involving some setting information plus one complete episode; (b) the rate of development differs depending on whether stories are true or invented; (c) patterns of such development are complex and cannot be represented by a steady curve upward.
The acquisition of object names in children with specific language impairment: Action context and word extension
Authors: Schwartz Richard G. , Leonard Laurence B. , Messick Cheryl , Chapman Kathy 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTSpecifically-language-impaired children and younger normal children matched for expressive language were presented with unfamiliar object names and referents across five experimental sessions. The objects differed in the degree to which they were associated with actions, and only certain of the object exemplars were named during presentation. Comprehension testing revealed that the specifically-language-impaired children acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children. However, their extension of the names to new exemplars was more restricted and less differentiated. Several possible accounts of these findings are evaluated.
The effect of language of instruction on reasoning in bilingual children
Authors: Malakoff Marguerite E. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe effect of language of instruction on verbal reasoning of balanced bilingual children was investigated. Subjects were 36 sixth-grade French-English bilinguals who were receiving primary instruction in either French or English. Eight types of verbal analogies were created by varying the language of the analogy stem (French or English), the language of the analogy solution (French or English), and level of difficulty (easy or hard). The primary analysis was conducted through ANOVA with program type as between-subjects variable and item types as repeated measures factors. The results showed a significant interaction between language of instruction and language of presentation. In addition, there were different language effects for the two groups. The introduction of the noninstructional language (French) had a significant effect on the mean response time of the English Language Program Group at both levels of difficulty. The French Language Program Group showed a more complex pattern of results: there was a statistically significant advantage for the All-English items as compared with the All-French items on the easy analogies but a trend towards poorer performance upon introduction of English on the hard analogies. These results are discussed in terms of the differences between the two groups of subjects and the effect of academic experience on language-related thought processes and fluency. The distinction between contextualized and decontextualized language is also discussed.
Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment
Authors: Leonard Laurence B. , Sabbadini Letizia , Volterra Virginia , Leonard Jeanette S. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe spontaneous speech of both English-speaking (E) and Italian-speaking (I) children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined to determine (a) whether phonological factors influence the grammatical morpheme use of ISLI children, as has been found for ESLI children, and (b) whether ESLI and ISLI children show similar syntactic abilities at the same level of mean utterance length as measured in words. The results indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced the ISLI children's tendency to use articles – the only Italian grammatical morphemes in which word-final consonants are required. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the ESLI and ISLI children. However, both groups of children seemed to have a problem using morphemes that constituted unstressed elements in a sentence even though the grammatical and semantic function of these elements varied across the two languages. The findings suggest that a speech production or perception component may be playing a greater role than previously believed in contributing to SLI children's well-documented expressive grammatical difficulties, though the specific effects of this factor will vary as a function of the surface characteristics of the language being acquired.
An analysis of the spelling errors of children who differ in their reading and spelling skills
Authors: Bruck Margaret , Waters Gloria 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTResults of recent studies comparing the spelling errors of children with varying discrepancies between their reading and spelling skills have yielded conflicting results. Some studies suggest that good readers-poor spellers (mixed) are characterized by a set of deficits that differentiates them from poor readers-poor spellers (poor). Other studies fail to find differences between groups of poor spellers who differ in their reading skills. The present study attempted to determine the degree to which these discrepant results reflected differences in methods of subject selection and of error analysis. Two different sets of criteria were used to identify poor spellers-good readers. Subjects were selected on the basis of standardized reading comprehension and spelling test scores or on the basis of standardized single-word-recognition and spelling-test scores. The phonetic accuracy of the spelling errors was assessed using two different scoring systems – one that took positional constraints into account and one that did not. In addition, children were identified at two different age levels, allowing for developmental comparisons. Regardless of age or reading ability, poor and mixed spellers had difficulty converting sounds into positionally appropriate graphemes. Only older children with good word recognition but poor spelling skills provided some evidence for a distinct subgroup of poor spellers. These children had relatively good visual memory for words and, unlike other poor spellers, showed relatively good use of rudimentary sound-letter correspondences.
Sentence comprehension in autistic children
Authors: Tager-Flusberg Helen 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTComprehension and strategy use by autistic children were tested in two experiments. Eighteen autistic subjects were compared with thirty normal 3- and 4-year-olds, matched on the PPVT and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices. In Experiment I subjects were asked to act out active and passive, biased and reversible sentences. The autistic group's overall comprehension was lower than that of the normal controls; although the autistic subjects did use a word-order strategy, they did not generally use a probable-event strategy. These findings were confirmed in Experiment II, in which the same procedure with anomalous three-word items was used. The results are interpreted as evidence that in autism there is a semantic-cognitive deficit in utilizing conceptual knowledge about relational aspects of the environment and that this deficit underlies the comprehension difficulties of autistic persons.
Language learning with restricted input: Case studies of two hearing children of deaf parents
Authors: Sachs Jacqueline , Bard Barbara , Johnson Marie L. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTTwo hearing children of deaf parents (initially 3;9 and 1;8) had been cared for almost exclusively by their mother, who did not speak or sign to them. Though the older child had heard language from TV and briefly at nursery school, his speech was below age level and structurally idiosyncratic. Intervention led to improvement in his expressive abilities, and by 4;2 the deviant utterance patterns had disappeared. In later years, his spontaneous speech and school performance were normal, though language testing revealed some weak areas. The younger child initially used no speech, but acquired language normally after intervention, with his brother as model. Implications for understanding the role of linguistic input in language development are discussed.
On the use of miniature artificial languages in second-language research
Authors: McLaughlin Barry 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article the hypothesis is advanced that the learning of a miniature artificial language (MAL) is second-language (L2) learning writ small. Recent research from MAL experiments is reviewed which, if the hypothesis is correct, throws light on inductive L2 learning, suggesting that in the “creative construction” process both “implicit” learning and analogic generalization are possible strategies. The argument is made that MAL experiments are heuristically valuable for L2 research and that more creative use of MAL methods can have pedagogical implications, since teaching, like MAL research, involves systematic manipulation of input.
Measurement of language production in two-year-olds: A structured laboratory technique
Authors: Corrigan Roberta , Di Paul Lorraine 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTTwo studies investigated use of an elicited imitation task to encourage the production of semantic relations by 20- to 28-month-old children. In both studies, a model repeated sentences containing target semantic relations several times, accompanied by three-dimensional props to aid the children's memory and to provide context for their language. Results suggested that even the youngest children could be motivated to imitate, and that the elicited imitation technique was particularly successful in increasing the frequency of certain semantic relations that tended to be infrequent in spontaneous speech. Elicited imitation may thus be advantageous over spontaneous speech sampling because it allows greater experimenter control over contextual variables than is possible in most naturalistic settings.
Phrase comprehension after brain damage
Authors: Berndt Rita Sloan , Caramazza Alfonso 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTComprehension of six dimensional adjectives was found to be intact in groups of left hemisphere-damaged, right hemisphere-damaged and neurologically normal patients. Phrases with those adjectives were interpreted quite differently by left hemisphere-damaged patients than by the other two groups, and a subgroup of left-damaged patients appeared to be responsible for that group's deviant responses to phrases such as slightly bigger. All patients in the left-damaged group had some difficulty with negative phrases such as not big, however. Patients with right hemisphere-damage had difficulty interpreting only negative phrases with small. Results are interpreted with reference to Luria's discussion of semantic aphasia, and with regard to recent findings concerning the role of the right hemisphere in language comprehension.
The acquisition of a second language phonology: Interaction of transfer and developmental factors
Authors: Hecht Barbara Frant , Mulford Randa 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of a second language phonology is examined with reference to two hypotheses: (1) the developmental position that second language phonology acquisition parallels first language acquisition versus (2) the transfer position that the learner’s phonological knowledge in the first language directly influences acquisition of a second language phonology. These two hypotheses are evaluated in light of data from a six-year-old Icelandic child learning English in a naturalistic setting, with particular emphasis on fricatives and affricates. This child’s phonological acquisition is best accounted for as a systematicinteractionbetween transfer from the first language and developmental processes. Transfer best predicts the relative difficulty of particular segments, while the developmental hypothesis best predicts which sounds will be substituted for those difficult segments.
Phonetic coding and order memory in relation to reading proficiency: A comparison of short-term memory for temporal and spatial order information
Authors: Katz Robert B. , Healy Alice F. , Shankweiler Donald 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTSince children with reading disability are known to have problems using a phonetic memory strategy, it was expected that their recall of order would be inferior to that of good readers in situations where a phonetic strategy is optimal, i.e., when temporal order recall, but not necessarily spatial order recall, is required. On separate tests for retention of temporal sequence and spatial location, the good readers were better than the poor readers on the temporal order task as expected, but contrary to expectation, they maintained their superiority on the spatial task as well. Nevertheless, differences in the error patterns of the good and the poor readers are supportive of earlier evidence that links poor readers' short-term memory deficiencies to reduced effectiveness of phonetic representation.
The onset of comprehension and production in a language delayed child
Authors: Gibson Deborah , Ingram David 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined the onset and acquisition of language comprehension and production in a language delayed child through the analysis of a daily diary kept from 2;5 to 3;10, in order to determine whether such data might contribute to our understanding of normal language development. The onset of both comprehension and production was substantially delayed, yet both underwent word spurts that approximated the normal rate of acquisition. The gap between comprehension and production was also greater than that found in normal children. The existence of the normal spurts was interpreted as indicating biologically determined milestones that are vital in the acquisition process. It is suggested that clinical intervention should set these milestones as goals of therapy.
Development of speech perception and speech production abilities in adult second language learners
Authors: Gass Susan 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examines the acquisition of production and perception by adult learners of English. The particular focus is voice onset time of initial /b/'s and /p/'s. The subjects are 10 nonnative speakers of English and six native speakers who provided identification responses to synthesized stimuli varying along a voice onset time continuum. Additionally, they each produced words with initial /b/'s and /p/'s. These measures were repeated at three 1-month intervals for the nonnative speakers. The results show that nonnative speaker perception differs from native speaker perception in two important ways: (1) stop consonants are perceived continuously rather than categorically and (2) nonnative speaker perception is influenced by the location of phoneme boundaries in both the native and target languages. Nonnative speaker production shows a greater amount of similarity to native speaker production, although, where deviations occur, nonnative speakers tend to overcompensate for differences between the native and target languages. Finally, methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of perception and production.
Learning disabled children's comprehension and production of syntactic devices for marking given versus new information
Authors: Donahue Mavis 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis study examined learning disabled children's ability to understand and use syntactic devices for marking given versus new information in discourse, a skill where syntactic and pragmatic knowledge intersect. Using a modification of Hornby's (1971) paradigm, learning disabled and nondisabled children in grades 1 through 6 selected pictures on the basis of varying sentence types, such that their choices revealed their identification of the given information in each sentence. The production of syntactic structures for marking new elements in sentences was also assessed. Multivariate analyses revealed grade and sex effects on the comprehension task, but the only effect involving group status indicated that learning disabled girls were less able to comprehend cleft sentences than the other children. On the production task, learning disabled children relied on less complex sentence types; however, their strategies for marking given versus new information were as effective as those of nondisabled children. Implications of these findings for the relations between syntactic repertoire and the ability to integrate given and new information in oral and written discourse are discussed.
Effects of adult communication behaviors on language-impaired children's verbal output
Authors: Moellman-Landa Rebecca , Olswang Lesley B. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe presence and effect of adult communication behaviors that reportedly facilitate children's verbal output were examined in clinician's and mothers' interaction with seven language-impaired children using a lag sequential analysis. Two language samples were collected from each child, one each by the clinician and mother of the child. Consecutive adult and child utterances were coded to identify adults' sharing of child's focus, child utterance length, adult utterance type, topic maintenance, lexical contingency, and time between utterances. Mothers were found to use facilitative communication behaviors more often than the children. Adults' ‘facilitative’ behaviors had limited effect on children's immediate output. Implications for assessing mothers' input to language-impaired children and eliciting language samples efficiently are discussed.
On code-switching inside NP
Authors: Sobin Nicholas J. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article it is argued that, contrary to the assertions of Pfaff (1979), adjective/noun code-switches inside NP are possible. While not strictly following the placement rules of the language of the adjective as claimed by Aguirre (1976) and others, these switches do appear to be limited by conditions on placement internal to the languages involved. So long as significant contrasts in the placement of particular categories of lexical items are maintained, code-switching inside NP is possible and can result in “creations” such as NPs with postnominal English color adjectives.
Transfer and developmental processes in adult foreign language speech production
Authors: Flege James Emil , Davidian Richard D. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis study tested the hypothesis that factors that shape children’s production of their native language (L1) will also influence adults’ pronunciation of sounds in a foreign language (L2). The final stops in CVC English words produced by 12 adult native speakers each of English, Polish, Spanish, and Chinese were phonetically transcribed. The frequency with which these stops were devoiced, deleted, or fricativized was tabulated. The Spanish subjects (unlike the Chinese or Poles) showed the effect of a transfer process, producing word-final /b, d, g/as fricatives. Subjects in all three non-native groups (but not the native English subjects) resembled English-learning children in devoicing word-final /b, d, g/. Subjects whose L1 does not have word-final stops (i.e., the native speakers of Chinese and Spanish) showed another process commonly observed in English L1 acquisition: final stop deletion. A number of language background variables (e.g., age of arrival in the United States) were found not to be significantly correlated with the accuracy of final stop production. These findings suggest that, in addition to transfer processes arising from L1/L2 phonetic and phonological differences, developmental processes similar to those affecting child L1 speech production also influence adult L2 speech production.
Responses to contingent queries in adults with mental retardation and pervasive developmental disorders
Authors: Paul Rhea , Cohen Donald J. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTEight young adults with autism and autistic-like pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) and eight mentally retarded adults were matched for nonverbal IQ and given a series of standard language tests. They were then engaged in conversations into which examiners injected three types of contingent query requests for clarification (‘I watched “Dynasty” last night.’ “You watched what?”). Results of the standard language measures revealed that the PDD group was inferior in all areas except articulation. Responses to the contingent, query task showed the PDD group to be both less specific and less willing to supply information beyond that directly queried. Implications of these results for understanding the social and linguistic deficiencies in autism are discussed.
First impressions: Children’s knowledge of words gained from a single exposure
Authors: Dickinson David K. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTTwo experiments examined factors affecting the initial phase of word learning. Four- to 11-year-olds heard new words in three presentation conditions: A conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Overall the results indicate that children at all ages could identify the new words as “words,” were sensitive to correct usage, and could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. Older children benefited more than younger ones from explicit definitions, suggesting that metalinguistic awareness and memory strategies affect word learning. Evidence also suggests that meanings for new words are better learned if the exemplar is peripheral to previously named categories than if the word is central to a previously named category.