Performance of bilingual Russian–English speakers and monolingual English speakers during auditory processing of competing lexical items was examined using eye tracking. Results revealed that both bilinguals and monolinguals experienced competition from English lexical items overlapping phonetically with an English target item (e.g., spear and speaker). However, only bilingual speakers experienced competition from Russian competitor items overlapping crosslinguistically with an English target (e.g., spear and spichki, Russian for matches). English monolinguals treated the Russian competitors as they did any other filler items. This difference in performance between bilinguals and monolinguals tested with exactly the same sets of stimuli suggests that eye movements to a crosslinguistic competitor are due to activation of the other language and to between-language competition rather than being an artifact of stimulus selection or experimental design.

The validity of phoneme recognition as an indicator of phonemic awareness at kindergarten age is investigated. Six paper and pencil phonemic awareness (PA) tests, phoneme recognition among them, are administered groupwise to Dutch children a few months before the beginning of formal literacy education. Additional phonological tests and an early reading test are administered individually. Ten months later, children are tested again with PA and literacy tests. Structural equation modeling shows the relations among tests to correspond broadly with findings reported in the literature. The PA test scores are determined by one common factor, and the early PA factor influences later literacy through its influence on later PA skill. Phoneme segmentation has the highest loading on the PA factor, but phoneme recognition is its best paper and pencil representative. Unlike phoneme segmentation, phoneme recognition competence can develop in the absence of literacy skills. Phoneme recognition equals phoneme segmentation in sensitivity and specificity when predicting later literacy failure.

This prospective longitudinal study examined the relationship between caregiver input to 9-month-old infants and their subsequent language. Mother–infant dyads were videotaped at ages 9, 12, and 30 months. Language comprehension (at 12 and 18 months) was measured by parent report and correlated with an independent language measure. Three maternal style variables were reduced from the 9-month data. Only caregivers' contingent comments (CCC) related to infants' later language. These findings held after infants' skill with coordinated joint attention (CJA) was taken into account. The total number of words the mothers used when their infants were 9 months predicted vocabulary; however, the predictive power was encapsulated in the words the mother used during CCC. Because studies have typically examined maternal input once infants' CJA has emerged, this work contributes to current efforts to understand variations in early language development.

It was predicted that children learning to read inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English) should show considerable flexibility in making use of spelling–sound correspondences at different unit sizes whereas children learning to read consistent orthographies (e.g., German) should mainly employ small-size grapheme–phoneme strategies. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-language blocking experiment using nonwords that could only be read using small-size grapheme–phoneme correspondences (small-unit nonwords) and phonologically identical nonwords that could be decoded using larger correspondences (large-unit nonwords). These small-unit and large-unit nonwords were either presented mixed together in the same lists or blocked by unit size. It was found that English children, but not German children, showed blocking effects (better performance when items were blocked by nonword type than in mixed lists). This suggests that in mixed lists, English readers have to switch back and forth between small-unit and large-unit processing, resulting in switching costs. These results are interpreted in terms of differences concerning the grain size of the phonological recoding mechanisms developed by English and German children.

The aim of this study was to compare some verbal characteristics of family interaction in the stereotypically tongue-tied Nordic region of the Western world. To this end we compared mothers' and early adolescents' talkativeness and monologuing and mothers' conversational dominance emerging in real-life video recordings in Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish mono- and bilingual families. All these nations have been characterized by previous research as “silent” and less talkative than other nations. The present study found that the Swedish mothers living in Sweden were talkative, as were the adolescents from Swedish monolingual and Swedish–Estonian bilingual families. In all measures of the amount of speech the mothers and adolescents from monolingual Estonian and Finnish families did not differ. According to our results, little talk seems to be characteristic of Finno–Ugric people, and the rate may be decreasing over time under the influence of a more talk-oriented cultural context.

There is limited research regarding what levels of proficiency in each language should characterize the language behavior of bilingual children and the impact of language exposure or language use variables on bilingual performance. This study was designed to examine the extent to which years of exposure to a language(s), amount of language input at home and at school, and amount of exposure to reading and other literacy activities in a language(s) relate to observed bilingual performance in young children, as obtained from parent and teacher reports. A secondary goal was to determine the extent to which parents or teachers could assist in determining language status by examining relationships between their ratings of the child's use and proficiency in the two languages and the child's grammatical performance. Fifty-seven children and their families were sampled from second grade classes of a large school district serving primarily low-income families in southern California. Multiple regression analyses for each language indicated that amount of Spanish input at home was a significant predictor of grammatical performance in that language. These input effects did not hold for English. Although there were some crosslinguistic differences, parent and teacher ratings of use and proficiency correlated with the child's grammatical performance in the target language. The findings suggest that parent and teacher estimates may be useful to determine bilingual status.

This study investigated the effects of first language word-level reading skills on the development of English as a second language (ESL) word-level reading skills. A crosslinguistic analysis indicates that native Arabic and Japanese speakers are likely to encounter different types of ESL word-level reading difficulties. Specifically, native Arab speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with prelexical ESL word recognition processes, whereas native Japanese speakers are likely to exhibit difficulties with on-line ESL word integration processes that integrate words into phrase/clause structures for comprehension. Results from a lexical decision task showed that a group of Japanese ESL learners had significantly faster and more accurate word recognition skills compared to a proficiency-matched Arab ESL group. In contrast, both groups read words within sentences in a sentence reading task at the same speed, though the Arab ESL group was significantly more accurate in integrating words into larger phrase and clause units and comprehending them than the Japanese ESL group. These results indicate that Arab and Japanese ESL students have different word-level reading difficulties, implicating different learning needs and pedagogical interventions for developing ESL reading proficiency.

Recent years have seen a whole series of book-length studies on the formal semantics of plurality and its relation to coordination, quantifier scope, and related phenomena (Landman, 2000; Lasersohn, 1995; Schein, 1993; Schwarzschild, 1996; etc.). Winter's book provides a very interesting and worthwhile addition to this list, and shows that despite the extensive attention this subject has received, there is a good deal more to be said.

This book presents a personal view of working with young children who have communication problems. It is aimed at practitioners working in early years settings, including nursery teachers, teaching assistants, speech and language therapists, and parents. Fleur Griffiths communicates her practice with heartfelt conviction. The reader is left with some vivid pictures of how successful interactions can be achieved between children with communication difficulties and adults. She also describes some useful techniques for working with children. Because the book is aimed primarily at practitioners, the author might assume that her readers have knowledge of communication problems. However, the range of speech and language difficulties, the plethora of names and labels for these difficulties, the lack of precision in the use of the labels, and the differing and often competing theories of language development and disorder make it almost obligatory for an author to specify what is meant by children with communication problems and to define what is meant by any technical term or piece of professional jargon the author might use. These terms are generally not clearly defined (e.g., the age range that corresponds to “early years” is not specified). For a lay reader, this lack of context and explanation could make parts of this book difficult to follow, with terms like semantic-pragmatics and phrases like “moments of agency with a synchronous partner” (p. 23) left poorly defined.

The third edition of this book was published in 2002. The editors explain its development from courses run at the Department of Human Communication Science, University College London, for nonspecialists who wanted to understand the speech and language problems of young children. Overall, it is successful in this aim.