Normally hearing students acquire most of their reading vocabulary from printed context, but little is known about this process in hearing-impaired students. Two studies, therefore, investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. The passages varied in their informativeness about the meaning of the unknown words. Ability to derive at least a partial meaning for a word in context was determined both by the type of context and the reading comprehension levels of the students. However, there was no relationship between reading comprehension scores and ability to determine the form class of the words in context. The results are related to the importance of integrating semantic information into a meaning schema for the passage in order to acquire new meanings for unknown words and to the local strategies adopted by poorer readers when attempting to answer comprehension questions. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed.

This article explores typology-based differences in patterns of bilingual behavior by analyzing code-switches of Korean-English bilingual speakers, a language group that has not received much study so far. Data collected from 20 balanced bilinguals was analyzed to address the issues of linguistic constraints on code-switching and applicability of the concepts of nonce borrowing, language assignment, and neutrality to the phenomena observed. Two interesting code-switching phenomena were found: a change of the part of speech in the process of making small-size nonequivalence constituent switches and an introduction of Korean “operating verbs,” which are inflected to indicate the degree of respect to the interlocutor. Four subjects (two males, two females), who were taped in two different contexts, showed a reduction in social code-switching and a higher rate of English monolingual sentences when talking to their spouses than to an acquaintance.

This study examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English–Chinese bilinguals. Our results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese–English bilinguals transfer animacybased strategies to English sentences; late English–Chinese bilinguals transfer English-like word order strategies to Chinese. Early bilinguals display a variety of transfer patterns, including differentiation (use of animacy strategies in Chinese and word order strategies in English) and backward transfer (use of L2 processing strategies in L1, a possible symptom of language loss). These unusual transfer patterns reflect a complex interaction of variables, including age of exposure to L2 and patterns of daily language use. Implications of these findings for the critical period hypothesis are discussed, together with some new hypotheses concerning the interaction between acquisition of L2 and maintenance of L1.

This is an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, and concepts about print in 3-year-old children. Forty–three normally developing children were given four tests of language development; twelve metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and structural awareness; and two measures of literacy knowledge. The results clearly demonstrated that most 3-year-olds can make metalinguistic judgments and productions in structured tasks, with overall metalinguistic performance improving with age in months. Specific metalinguistic tasks varied in difficulty and probably in developmental order. The major domains of metalinguistic awareness (phonological, word, and structural) were significantly intercorrelated and also correlated with overall linguistic skill. Literacy knowledge was positively correlated with overall metalinguistic skill and, specifically, with phonological awareness. It is concluded that, as young as age 3, children are already rapidly developing a mental framework for analyzing language structure separately from language meaning