Fourteen mother–child dyads were videotaped four times over 16 days as they repeatedly read an initially unfamiliar storybook. Videotapes were transcribed and a variety of discourse measures were coded for both mother and child. Principal components analysis was used to combine three maternal and three child variables into a single composite variable, engagement, which described levels and quality of maternal and child participation in extratextual interactions during the first reading session. Dyads with the highest levels of engagement during the first session showed the greatest rates of change for a number of discourse measures. Results are discussed in terms of maternal scaffolding approaches, child participation, the importance of context and the nature of the task, and implications for intervention.

The present study focuses on the production of predicates by Korean agrammatic aphasic patients with respect to the argument structure distribution of the predicates. We analyzed narrative production data and picture/scene description data elicited from three Broca's aphasic patients in comparison with matched controls. In particular, we examined whether our subjects have the same kind of difficulties that Kegl's English agrammatic patient exhibited in the production of noncopular unaccusative constructions. The results show that our Korean aphasics do not exhibit any dramatic discrepancy from the control group in the pattern of argument structure distribution of the predicates produced. Regarding methodology, our studies reveal that the picture/scene description measures the subjects' competence more effectively than the narrative production task. We propose that the difference found between our agrammatic patients and Kegl's agrammatic subject may be due to the differences in the syntactic processes for deriving unaccusative constructions in the two languages.

The present study addresses a long-standing assumption in the field of applied linguistics: that presenting new second language (L2) vocabulary in semantically grouped sets is an effective method of teaching. Participants learned 32 new L2 labels for concepts from four different semantic categories in either a related or unrelated condition. At test, participants translated words in both translation directions. We found a semantic interference effect both during the encoding of information into memory and during the retrieval of information in translation. We discuss these findings in terms of theoretical models of L2 lexical representation and development, as well as in more practical terms of L2 curriculum design and vocabulary instruction.

This article examines the reliability and validity of the construct, mode of acquisition (MOA). The MOA of a word denotes the way in which the word's meaning is learned. A word's meaning can be acquired perceptually, linguistically, or by some combination of both. In Experiment 1, 26 student volunteers from third year special education courses rated 566 words, taken from reading texts in elementary school, on MOA. Our findings show that MOA ratings gradually change over grades, shifting from mainly perceptually acquired word meanings in Grade 1 texts to mainly linguistically acquired concepts in Grade 6 texts. In Experiment 2, 34 educational professionals completed a list on MOA, concreteness, or imageability. Judgments on the MOA proved to be different from judgments of concreteness and imageability. We suggest that the increasingly linguistic character of word meanings contribute to explaining some of the reading difficulties of deaf children.

The goals of this study are to investigate, at three elementary school grade levels, how word reading speed is related to rapidly naming series of numbers, letters, colors, and pictures, and to general processing speed (measured by nonnaming or visual matching tasks), and also to determine how these relationships vary with the reading task employed. The results indicate that, compared to color- and picture-naming speeds and nonnaming or visual matching speed, letter- and number-naming speeds are superior predictors of word reading speed. Furthermore, throughout the grade levels, associations between alphanumeric naming and monosyllabic word reading speeds are considerably stronger than for a widely used Dutch single-word reading test combining monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. It is suggested that, unlike multisyllabic words but similar to letters and numbers, monosyllabic words act as relatively holistic stimuli, which are recognized as sight words.

The study examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Because native speakers of Arabic first learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking, it was hypothesized that the linguistic differences between the two varieties, the so-called diglossic variables, would interfere with the acquisition of basic reading processes in MSA. Two diglossic variables were examined: phoneme and word syllabic structure. The children's phoneme isolation and pseudoword decoding skills were tested. The results showed that both diglossic variables interfered with the children's performance of both tasks in both grades. The findings support the role of linguistic distance in the acquisition of basic reading processes in a diglossic context.

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.

This concise overview of English as an international language is written so clearly that not only does it provide an excellent discussion of the major issues in the field, but it also is a highly enjoyable book to read. The central premise in this book is that English is in fact an international language par excellence, and that teaching it as such and doing research in it calls for unique approaches and methodologies.