Many previous studies of children's spelling have adopted a narrow approach, examining one linguistic structure at a time and paying little attention to differences among children or changes with development. We broadened the focus by examining two different, but potentially related, patterns (stressed syllabic /r/ and letter-name vowels) and by tracking changes in performance from fall to spring of first grade. The results show how children move from using one letter for each phonological unit (e.g., SR for sir; KON for cone) to appreciating the function of “extra” letters (e.g., the vowel letters i of sir and e of cone). Errors such as SRE for sir may arise during this process, reflecting an overgeneralization of the silent e pattern. The results are generally consistent with the view that spelling becomes more “orthographic” with development. However, the course of development is not always as predicted by existing stage theories.

Based on the Competition Model, the present study investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-à-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). The subjects were L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese and English. The results show that both Chinese and English monolingual controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as determinants for Chinese and English sentence processing. Nevertheless, context was found to play a bigger role in Chinese than in English. As for L2 learners, the main effect of context was significant in all groups of learners of Chinese and English. However, the Chinese EFL learners relied on context to a greater extent than did the English CFL learners when processing their respective L2.

This article presents a new method that can compare lexical priming (word–word) and sentential priming (sentence–word) directly within a single paradigm. We show that it can be used to address modular theories of word comprehension, which propose that the effects of sentence context occur after lexical access has taken place. Although lexical priming and sentential priming each occur very quickly in time, there should be a brief time window in which the former is present but the latter is absent. Lexical and sentential priming of unambiguous words were evaluated together, in competing and converging combinations, using time windows designed to detect an early stage where lexical priming is observed but sentential priming is not. Related and unrelated word pairs were presented visually, in rapid succession, within auditory sentence contexts that were either compatible or incompatible with the target (the second word in each pair). In lexical decision, the additive effects of lexical priming and sentential priming were present under all temporal conditions, although the latter was always substantially larger. In cross-modal naming, sentential priming was present in all temporal conditions; lexical priming was more fragile, interacting with timing and sentential congruence. No evidence was found for a stage in which lexical priming is present but sentential priming is absent – a finding that is difficult to reconcile with two-stage models of lexical versus sentential priming. We conclude that sentential context operates very early in the process of word recognition, and that it can interact with lexical priming at the earliest time window.

Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual and bilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and association tasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and the input frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4- and 7-year-olds. These studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers with respect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency in primary education.

Topic choice, topic synchrony, and utterance function during mother–child play sessions at age 3 were examined in 32 late talkers (identified at 24 to 31 months) and 21 comparison children, matched at intake on age, SES, and nonverbal ability. At age 3, late talkers had significantly lower MLUs and IPSyn scores than comparison children. Late talkers and comparison children did not differ in number of utterances, topic initiation, topic synchrony, use of commands, reactions to commands, or conversational fillers. However, late talkers asked significantly fewer questions, provided fewer answers to maternal questions, made fewer declarative statements, and were less likely to elaborate on their own topic than comparison children. Mothers of late talkers produced significantly more utterances and asked many more questions, but otherwise they did not differ from mothers of comparison children. In both groups, children and mothers were highly synchronous. When late talkers were divided into two groups (children with continuing delay vs. “late bloomers” who were within the normal range in MLU), the subgroups did not differ significantly from each other on any conversational measure.

We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions – the double-object dative, the to dative, and the for dative – in the spontaneous speech of seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, the double-object dative was acquired by most of the children before either of the prepositional datives; this was attributed to the greater frequency with which children heard this construction with individual verbs. Second, the verbs children used with these constructions were not only the adult prototypical ones, but also a number of the less prototypical ones; again, this was very likely due to their frequency and saliency in the language children heard. Third, no support was found for Ninio's (1999) analysis of the emergence of constructions in terms of a single “pathbreaking” verb; rather, children began using the double-object dative with many different verbs and did not follow the trajectory proposed by Ninio (i.e., a single verb is used for some months before an “explosion” of new verbs is introduced in the construction). Finally, most of the verbs initially used in the three dative constructions were first used in other constructions (e.g., a simple transitive); this was even true for some obligatory datives, such as give and show. The current results provide a starting point for determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions and for explicating how children understand the interrelations among these and other constructions.

“On 4 November 1995 Kasabe existed; on 5 November it did not.” This brief obituary in David Crystal's book (p. 1) does not refer to a creature. It refers to an African language, known as Luo, that had been spoken in Cameroon; on the day in question, Bogon, the last speaker of Kasabe, died, taking his language with him. According to Crystal, half of the world's current languages are in danger of dying, and the situation is so grave that an international and interdisciplinary effort must be mounted to rescue them. Crystal has written this book to alert us to the peril and to suggest ways in which our linguistic diversity might be maintained.

This stimulating volume is the outcome of a 1996 conference, the first in the laboratory phonology series to incorporate psycholinguistic topics, including six chapters addressing acquisition. Here, as in the earlier conferences, the primary focus is on the relationship between phonetics and phonology. For example, in the first section, “Articulation and Mental Representation,” Munhall, Kawato, and Vatikiotis-Bateson provide a lucid account of the state of the art in physical models of articulation; they conclude with a discussion of the difficulty of identifying the interface between phonology and speech production. In a related study, the relevance of overarching prosodic structure (“phrasal signatures”) to low-level articulatory effects is illustrated in some detail by Byrd, Kaun, Narayanan, and Saltzman, who find that “prosodic structure is manifest in the details of articulation. . . . The abstract symbolic representation useful to linguistics [must be integrated] with a dynamical model of human movement useful to speech scientists” (p. 85).

Judith Rosenthal has brought together a wide variety of articles on second language (L2) teaching and learning that will surely interest foreign language (FL) educators in U.S. universities who are struggling to increase or maintain enrollment in their courses or who are seeking new ideas to meet the needs and demands of an increasingly diverse student population. Rather than encourage individual language departments to continue their separate battles for survival, Rosenthal hopes to enhance the “integration” of FL programs in order “to better promote proficiency in more than one language” (p. 353). This volume clearly illustrates how teachers of various languages can collaborate and share experiences in order to find solutions to what are often very similar problems.