This study tested the diverging predictions of recent theories of children's learning of spelling regularities. We asked younger (Grades 1 and 2) and older (Grades 3 and 4) elementary school–aged children to choose the correct endings for words that varied in their morphological structure. We tested the impacts of semantic frequency by including three types of words ending in -er: derived and inflected forms, the first of which are far more frequent across the language, and one-morpheme control forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct ending for derived forms over one-morpheme control words. This difference emerged for inflected forms only for the older children. We also tested the impacts of orthographic frequency by contrasting performance on the two derived allomorphs -er and -or, the first of which is far more frequent, and comparison one-morpheme forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct spelling for the derivational -er over the same letter pattern in control words. This difference did not emerge in either group for the -or ending. The implications of these findings for current models of children's spelling development are discussed.

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading times for critical segments, results showed that different proficiency groups of Taiwanese English learners resolved such ambiguities in a way similar to native speakers to varying extents. The findings suggest that the sentence-processing mechanism of human language is subject to sufficient facility with syntactic access and/or with a network of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information of individual speakers.

In the light of the literature describing oral language difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD), event-related potentials were used in order to compare morphosyntactic processing in 16 adults with DD (aged 20–28 years) and unimpaired controls. Sentences including subject–verb agreement violations were presented auditorily, with grammaticality and subject number as main factors. Electrophysiological data revealed differences between groups concerning both the latency of the P600 component and the additional presence in the DD group of a negativity broadly diffused all over the scalp. Moreover, these electrophysiological anomalies increased when plural sentences were processed. On the whole, the results support the hypothesis of a linguistic deficit and of different language processing modalities in DD participants.

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic se (n = 15) and the other exposed to se only incidentally (n = 20). Explicit instruction consisted of grammar rules with sentence-level examples, followed by communicative tasks. Three test versions were administered within a split-bloc design as a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest 6 weeks after instruction. The instructed group increased targetlike uses of se on both tasks and sustained gains through the delayed posttest, although first-language transfer errors persisted. Meanwhile, overgeneralization errors centered on semantic and syntactic contexts similar to the instructional object, aligning with the unergative–unaccusative distinction among intransitive verbs. It is argued that the data provide evidence for the permeability of second-language implicit knowledge to explicit instruction and against total encapsulation as a model of the mind.

The influences of word decoding, availability, and accessibility of semantic word knowledge on reading comprehension were investigated for monolingual (n = 65) and bilingual children (n = 70). Despite equal decoding abilities, monolingual children outperformed bilingual children with regard to reading comprehension and availability of semantic word knowledge. Individual differences in reading comprehension were accounted for by differences in availability of semantic word knowledge and to a lesser extent by speed of access to this semantic knowledge. Speed of access accounted for variance in reading comprehension beyond the variance accounted for by decoding and availability of semantic knowledge. A path model suggests that reading comprehension differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are mediated by availability of semantic knowledge. Analyses showed no significant interaction between predictor variables and language background. A multigroup analysis distinguishing proficient and less proficient comprehenders showed a small difference between the two proficiency groups, suggesting that the lexical–semantic variables are more predictive of reading proficiency in the proficient group than in the less proficient group.

We investigated the factors that may help understand the differential rates of language development in the home language (i.e., Spanish) of Latino preschoolers with specific language impairment. Children were randomly assigned to either bilingual or English-only small group interventions and followed from preschool to kindergarten. Predictors of Spanish growth included the language of intervention, the child's level of language development or severity, the child's socioemotional skills, and the child's level of English use. Spanish performance outcomes were assessed over time using a series of longitudinal models with baseline and posttreatment measures nested within child. Children demonstrated growth on Spanish outcomes over time. The language of instruction and the child's level of vocabulary and socioemotional development at baseline were significant predictors of differences in rates of growth in the home language. Clinicians may need to take into consideration these factors when making clinical recommendations.

The longitudinal predictive power of four important reading-related skills (phonological skills, rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness) to Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) was examined in a 3-year longitudinal study among 251 Chinese elementary students. Rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness assessed in Grade 1 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading in Grades 1 to 4. As for word spelling, rapid naming was the only significant predictor across grades. Morphological awareness was a robust predictor of word spelling in Grade 1 only. Phonological skills and orthographic skills significantly predicted word spelling in Grades 2 and 4. After controlling for autoregressive effects, morphological awareness and orthographic skills were the significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading and word spelling, respectively. These findings reflected the impacts of the Chinese orthography on children's reading and spelling development.