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.

School-aged, hearing-impaired children's propensity for incorporating complex syntax into the narratives and conversations they produced was investigated. Language samples containing both conversations and narratives in the form of story retellings were collected from seven subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing losses. Both portions of the samples were analyzed for a set of basic and complex syntax features discussed in the developmental literature. In addition, the narrative portions of the samples were analyzed for the subjects' use of the components of story grammar, appropriate use of cohesion, and episode integrity.

Normally hearing children (aged 4–10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6–14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed significantly better than hearing-impaired children. However, orally educated children with mild or moderate hearing losses did not perform better than children with severe or profound losses. Instead, hearingimpaired children exhibited marked metalinguistic deficits, regardless of their degree of hearing loss. Finally, bimodally educated children performed significantly worse than orally educated children on the metalinguistic tasks of the present study. The implications of these findings for educational instruction are discussed.

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20–29 years, 60–69 years, 70–79 years, and 80–89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. Results of the lexical decision task revealed longer reaction times and somewhat different patterns of performance for the older subjects as compared to the young subjects; on the repetition task, the oldest subjects performed more poorly overall. Findings are suggestive of a reduction in computational capacity in the elderly subjects, which may account for observed decrements in syntactic processing as compared to young adults.

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.