bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The measurement of bilingualism and its relationship to cognitive ability
Authors: Lemmon Christian R. , Goggin Judith P. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTTheories 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

ABSTRACTPreschool 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

ABSTRACTChild 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

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTAn 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTMean 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTChildren'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.
Learning disabled children's conversational competence: responses to inadequate messages
Authors: Donahue Mavis , Pearl Ruth , Bryan Tanis 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis 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

ABSTRACTThis 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

AbstractThe 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

ABSTRACTThe 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

ABSTRACTThe 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

AbstractDeficits 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

AbstractThis 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

AbstractTo 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

AbstractWe 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.