The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the better recall of emotional words applies to both native and later-learned languages. In a mixed design, 41 native Finnish speakers, who were substantially less proficient in their later-learned languages, which were English (second language) and Swedish (third language), were shown negative/taboo, positive, and neutral words in the three languages. Their memory for the words was assessed in an unexpected free recall test preceded by a depth of processing task (deep or shallow). The results revealed that an emotion-word advantage was visible for negatively valenced words (negative/taboo) in the native language, Finnish, and the second language, English. However, the nature of the processing task had no significant effect on recall. Additional self-report measures indicated that English was perceived as more emotional and more frequently used than Swedish. These results suggest that the amount and frequency of everyday exposure to a particular language are two critical factors in determining the degree of emotionality of that language for the speaker.

Sentence and text comprehension is known to be difficult for orally trained individuals with hearing impairment. This study explored the comprehension of several syntactic structures that are especially difficult for these individuals and may lead them to experience considerable comprehension difficulties. Ten structures derived by wh-movement were tested, some of them for the first time in hearing impairment research: five types of relative clauses, three types of wh-questions, and two types of topicalized structures, compared with two types of simple sentences. Experiment 1 tested subject and object relatives using a sentence–picture matching task. Experiment 2 tested subject questions and object questions using a picture selection task. Experiment 3 tested subject and object relatives using comprehension questions. Experiment 4 tested subject and object relatives and topicalized sentences using a reading and paraphrasing task. The participants were 24 orally trained Palestinian Arabic speaking individuals, 21 of them had mild to profound binaural hearing loss, and 3 had monaural hearing loss. The participants with binaural hearing impairment, who were not sufficiently exposed to language input during the first year of life, failed to understand object relatives, object questions, and topicalization in subject–verb and verb–subject orders in both Palestinian Arabic and Standard Arabic. In some tasks, they even had difficulty understanding subject relatives and subject questions. The monaurally hearing impaired performed similarly to the controls on all tasks.

In picture naming, semantic context words produce either facilitation or inhibition, depending on their relationship to the target-picture name. This study used the picture–word interference task to examine facilitative effects of associates (the word carrot paired with a picture of rabbit) and inhibitory effects of coordinates (mouse paired with a rabbit) in children and adults. Experiment 1 with adults (N = 44) documented robust associate and coordinate effects with either auditory or visual presentation of interfering words. Experiment 2 used auditory presentation of interfering words with children (N = 44, 6 years, 10 months to 11 years, half with typical development, half with specific language impairment). Children showed significant facilitation from associates but no reliable coordinate interference effect. The strength of the associative priming effect in children was correlated with their language abilities (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals scores). The results indicate the dominant role of association in facilitating word retrieval in speech production in children. In children with specific language impairment, lexical access gains weaker support from networks of associations in semantic memory.

This paper investigates the limited attainment of adult compared to child language acquisition in terms of learned attention to morphological cues. It replicates Ellis and Sagarra in demonstrating short-term learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in Latin, and it extends the investigation using eye-tracking indicators to determine the extent to which these biases are overt or covert. English native speakers learned adverbial and morphological cues to temporal reference in a small set of Latin phrases under experimental conditions. Comprehension and production data demonstrated that early experience with adverbial cues enhanced subsequent use of this cue dimension and blocked the acquisition of verbal tense morphology. Effects of early experience of verbal morphology were less pronounced. Eye-tracking measures showed that early experience of particular cue dimensions affected what participants overtly focused upon during subsequent language processing and how this overt study resulted in turn in covert attentional biases in comprehension and in productive knowledge.

Dual language children enter school with varying levels of proficiencies in their first and second language. This study of Latino children of immigrants (N = 163) analyzes their dual language profiles at kindergarten and second grade, derived from the direct assessment of Spanish and English proficiencies (Woodcock Language Proficiency Batteries—Revised). Children were grouped based on the similarity of language profiles (competent profiles, such as dual proficient, Spanish proficient, and English proficient; and low-performing profiles, including borderline proficient and limited proficient). At kindergarten, the majority of children (63%) demonstrated a low-performing profile; by second grade, however, the majority of children (64%) had competent profiles. Change and stability of language profiles over time of individual children were then analyzed. Of concern, are children who continued to demonstrate a low-performing, high-risk profile. Factors in the linguistic environments at school and home, as well as other family and child factors associated with dual language profiles and change/stability over time were examined, with a particular focus on the persistently low-performing profile groups.

The goal of the study was to assess differences between native Greek and bilingual, immigrant children of Albanian descent learning Greek as a second language on a receptive vocabulary measure. Vocabulary measures were obtained at five time points, 6 months apart, from 580 children attending Grades 2–4. Individual variability on both initial performance (intercept) and growth rate (slope) was assessed using hierarchical linear modeling, which included linguistic/ethnic group, parental education (as a socioeconomic status [SES] indicator), gender, and a measure of nonverbal cognitive ability as time-invariant predictors of vocabulary growth. Results indicated that linguistic/ethnic group, parental education, and baseline nonverbal cognitive ability were significant predictors of initial vocabulary scores, whereas only linguistic/ethnic group and nonverbal ability accounted for significant variability in vocabulary growth rates. Additional analyses confirmed that linguistic/ethnic group remained a significant predictor of receptive vocabulary knowledge at both the intercept and the slope levels even after controlling for the initial differences between groups on parental education and block design subtest scores.