This study examines inflectional abilities in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) using a verb elicitation task. Eleven children with SLI and age-matched controls (37–52 months) participated in the experiment. We elicited the passé composé using eight regular and eight irregular high frequency verbs matched for age of acquisition. Children with SLI showed dissimilar productive verb inflection abilities to control children (even when comparing participants with similar verb vocabularies and mean length of utterance in words). Control children showed evidence of overregularization and sensitivity to morphological structure, whereas no such effects were observed in the SLI group. Error patterns observed in the SLI group demonstrate that, at this age, they cannot produce passé composé forms in elicitation tasks, even though some participants used them spontaneously. Either context by itself might therefore be insufficient to fully evaluate productive linguistic abilities in children with SLI.

We tested the hypothesis that syntactic and narrative comprehension of a natural sign language can serve as the linguistic basis for skilled reading. Thirty-one adults who were deaf from birth and used American Sign Language (ASL) were classified as skilled or less skilled readers using an eighth-grade criterion. Proficiency with ASL syntax, and narrative comprehension of ASL and Manually Coded English (MCE) were measured in conjunction with variables including exposure to print, nonverbal IQ, and hearing and speech ability. Skilled readers showed high levels of ASL syntatic ability and narrative comprehension whereas less skilled readers did not. Regression analyses showed ASL syntactic ability to contribute unique variance in English reading performance when the effects of nonverbal IQ, exposure to print, and MCE comprehension were controlled. A reciprocal relationship between print exposure and sign language proficiency was further found. The results indicate that the linguistic basis of reading, and the reciprocal relationship between print exposure and “through the air” language, can be bimodal, as in being a sign language or a spoken language, and bilingual, as in being ASL and English.

In multilingual Asian communities, determining language dominance for clinical assessment and intervention is often complex. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report classification tool for identifying the dominant language in English–Mandarin bilinguals. Participants (N = 168) completed a questionnaire on language history and single-word receptive vocabulary tests (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test type) in both languages. The results of a discriminant analysis on the self-report data revealed a reliable three-way classification into English-dominant, Mandarin-dominant, and balanced bilinguals. The vocabulary scores supported these dominance classifications, whereas the more typical variables such as age of first exposure, years of formal instruction, and years of exposure exerted only a limited influence. The utility of this classification tool in clinical settings is discussed.

Arabic Literacy acquisition was studied among Israeli Palestinian low socioeconomic status kindergartners within the framework of an intervention study, implemented by teachers. On pretest, letter naming, alphabetic awareness, and phonological awareness were very low. Whereas the comparison group hardly progressed throughout the year, the intervention group progressed substantially on all three skills. The diglossic nature of the Arabic letter name system was manifested in children's transition from a mixture of two systems to preference for standard over colloquial names following the intervention. As in other alphabets, visual similarity and adjacency increased letter confusability. The unique features of Arabic literacy are discussed.

Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is highly prevalent were tested on their abilities to manipulate familiar morphemes to create novel compound words as well as on a variety of early language and reasoning measures twice over the span of 9 months to 1 year. With Time 1 vocabulary knowledge, phonological processing, and reasoning skills controlled, morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Time 2 vocabulary knowledge across languages. Across languages, vocabulary knowledge also predicted unique variance in subsequent morphological awareness, with Time 1 morphological awareness controlled. Findings underscore the bidirectional bootstrapping of morphological awareness and vocabulary acquisition for languages in which lexical compounding is prominent, and suggest that morphological awareness may be practically important in predicting and fostering children's early vocabulary learning.

This study examined the role of phonological memory in second language (L2) grammar learning in a group of native French-speaking children undergoing a 5-month intensive English program. Phonological memory (as referenced by Arabic [ANWR] and English [ENWR] nonword repetition tasks), L2 vocabulary (receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge), and L2 grammar (knowledge of morphosyntactic structures) were assessed during the first (Time 1) and last (Time 2) month of the program. After controlling for initial grammar ability, phonological memory significantly predicted grammar development (27.9% of variance explained) in addition to the contribution made by vocabulary knowledge (9.5% of variance explained). Although phonological memory ability as measured by ENWR increased between Time 1 and Time 2, ANWR did not improve. The findings show that phonological memory plays an important role in L2 grammar development that is unmediated by lexical knowledge. They also provide evidence that phonological memory improves with language development, but that basic phonological memory capacity (as measured by ANWR in this study) remains unchanged over time.

Models such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers’ mastery of French /ʁ/ and Spanish /ɾ/. Based on an acoustic analysis of the learner data, we demonstrate that these three models do not account for the full range of variability nor for the developmental sequences attested, because they do not consider the degree of difficulty involved in the simultaneous mastery of multiple phonetic parameters across prosodic positions. Consequently, models of L2 phonological acquisition must not only integrate findings from markedness theory and speech perception but also incorporate phonetic constraints on production.