Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive difficulties using an auditory lexical decision task with long words and nonsense words. The dyslexics were slower and less accurate than chronological age controls in an auditory lexical decision task, with disproportionate low performance on nonsense words. The finding suggests that input processing difficulties are associated with the phonological deficit, but that these difficulties may be stronger above the level of phoneme perception.

Psychological research has emphasized the importance of narrative for a person's sense of self. Building a coherent narrative of past events is one objective of psychotherapy. However, in guided self-help therapy the patient has to develop this narrative autonomously. Identifying patients’ narrative skills in relation to psychological distress could provide useful information about their suitability for self-help. The aim of this study was to explore whether the syntactic integration of clauses into narrative in texts written by prospective psychotherapy patients was related to mild to moderate psychological distress. Cross-clausal syntax of texts by 97 people who had contacted a primary care mental health service was analyzed. Severity of symptoms associated with mental health difficulties was assessed by a standardized scale (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation outcome measure). Cross-clausal syntactic integration was negatively correlated with the severity of symptoms. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that the use of simple sentences, finite complement clauses, and coordinated clauses was associated with symptoms (R2 = .26). The results suggest that the analysis of cross-clausal syntax can provide information on patients’ narrative skills in relation to distressing events and can therefore provide additional information to support treatment decisions.

This longitudinal study investigated changes in reported language usage between Puerto Rican mothers and their preschoolers over a 4-year period. It also examined whether differences in language usage occurred depending on the timing of children's exposure to English and children's gender. Seventy-six mothers reported the languages they and their children used when talking to each other during 2 years in Head Start, kindergarten, and first grade. Mothers of children who were exposed to Spanish and English prior to preschool entry reported using more English to their children than mothers of children who were not exposed to English until after preschool entry. The language usage of the children followed the same patterns as their mothers. The difference between the groups was maintained over the 4 years, although both groups increased their English usage. A gender effect was observed. Mothers of girls were five times more likely to use “More or All Spanish” than mothers of sons. In addition, girls who were exposed to Spanish only prior to preschool entry were six times more likely to speak to their mothers in “More or All Spanish” than other participating children. The bidimensional model of acculturation is used to present and interpret the findings.

In this study, the influence of plausibility information on the real-time processing of locally ambiguous (“garden path”) sentences in a nonnative language is investigated. Using self-paced reading, we examined how advanced Greek-speaking learners of English and native speaker controls read sentences containing temporary subject–object ambiguities, with the ambiguous noun phrase being either semantically plausible or implausible as the direct object of the immediately preceding verb. Besides providing evidence for incremental interpretation in second language processing, our results indicate that the learners were more strongly influenced by plausibility information than the native speaker controls in their on-line processing of the experimental items. For the second language learners an initially plausible direct object interpretation lead to increased reanalysis difficulty in “weak” garden-path sentences where the required reanalysis did not interrupt the current thematic processing domain. No such evidence of on-line recovery was observed, in contrast, for “strong” garden-path sentences that required more substantial revisions of the representation built thus far, suggesting that comprehension breakdown was more likely here.

This study investigates the utility and validity of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for use with low-income parents and their 24- to 36-month-old Spanish–English bilingual children (n = 79). Issues in the interpretation of the integrated CDI/Inventarios del Desarrollo de Habilidades Comunicativas (IDHC) score to index bilingual children's overall conceptual knowledge are also considered. Results indicate that the CDI/IDHC can be used with this population through at least age 36 months and parents are accurate reporters of their children's Spanish and English vocabulary. The value of the integrated score was confirmed. However, given the lack of norms associated with the integrated score, the complexity of determining how best to interpret this score was underscored.

We examined recalled narratives of boys with fragile X syndrome with autism spectrum disorder (FXS-ASD; N = 28) and without ASD (FXS-O; N = 29), and compared them to those of boys with Down syndrome (N = 33) and typically developing (TD) boys (N = 39). Narratives were scored for mentions of macrostructural story grammar elements (introduction, relationship, initiating events, internal response, attempts/actions, and ending). We found that narrative recall is predicted by short-term memory and nonverbal mental age levels in almost all groups (except TD), but not by expressive syntax or caregiver education. After adjusting for these covariates, there were no differences between the three groups with intellectual disability. The FXS-ASD group, however, had significantly poorer performance than the TD group on the overall story grammar score, and both the FXS-O and FXS-ASD groups had lower attempts/actions scores than the TD group. We conclude that some form of narrative impairment may be associated with FXS, that this impairment may be shared by other forms of intellectual disability, and that the presence of ASD has a significantly detrimental effect on narrative recall.

This tutorial for the statistical processing of reaction times collected through a repeated-measure design is addressed to researchers in psychology. It aims at making explicit some important methodological issues, at orienting researchers to the existing solutions, and at providing them some evaluation tools for choosing the most robust and precise way to analyze their data. The methodological issues we tackle concern data filtering, missing values management, and statistical modeling (F1, F2, F1 + F2, quasi-F, mixed-effects models with hierarchical, or with crossed factors). For each issue, references and remedy suggestions are given. In addition, modeling techniques are compared on real data and a benchmark is given for estimating the precision and robustness of each technique.

Research has demonstrated that second language (L2) vocabulary learning improves when target words are presented in acoustically varied compared with acoustically consistent formats. The present study investigated the extent to which this benefit of acoustic variability is a consequence of difficult encoding demands (cognitive effort hypothesis) versus increased representational quality. Experiment 1 compared L2 vocabulary learning for words produced in normal (easier encoding) or nasal (more difficult encoding) voice. Vocabulary learning was superior in the normal-voice condition, arguing against a simple cognitive effort hypothesis as the basis for improved L2 vocabulary learning with increased acoustic variability. Experiment 2 assessed the resistance of newly acquired L2 word forms to the effects of acoustic degradation. Participants heard six repetitions of each item in either a single-talker or multiple-talker condition. The robustness of the new word-form representations was assessed by measuring the accuracy and latency of L2 to first language (L1) translation as a function of the signal/noise ratio. At all four signal/noise ratios, accuracy and latency of L2 to L1 translation were significantly better for words learned in the multiple-talker as opposed to the single-talker condition. Of particular importance, the difference between single talkers and multiple talkers increased systematically as signal/noise ratio decreased. These findings suggest that the benefits of acoustic variability are a consequence of learners' ability to retain and use indexical information during the earliest stages of word learning and provide support for the representation quality hypothesis.

There were eight occurrences of an incorrect spelling of the adjectival term language-learning as language-leaning in the original article (Bird, 2010). These typographical errors occurred in the first few pages only, which are reprinted herein. We regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.