The purpose of this study was to evaluate children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their proficiency with the use of prepositions. Ten children with SLI were compared to 10 younger, normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance and 10 children matched for age. Each child was asked to produce 24 sentences containing locative (in, on) and dative (to) prepositions. Responses were coded for omission or word selection errors for the target prepositions. It was hypothesized that children with SLI would make more errors than the typically developing children. Omission errors would support a difficulty with syntax because of the role prepositions play in case marking. Word selection errors would support a deficit in the area of semantics. The results confirmed that children with SLI made more errors than the control group. The children with SLI made more errors in the selection of dative prepositions, indicating a difficulty linking the semantics of prepositions and verbs.

Children often listen to speech in noisy environments, where they must use prior knowledge to help them interpret the intended signal. The present experiment compares school-aged children's and adults' use of one such form of prior knowledge, as demonstrated in the perceptual restoration effect. Children, like adults, perform better when speech is intermittently replaced with noise than when it is replaced with silence, suggesting that children are able to make use of prior knowledge to help them restore interrupted signals. Despite this fact, children appear to be more affected by acoustic signal disruptions than are adult listeners, suggesting they will experience greater difficulty in noisy environments.

The study examined the impact of the phonemic and lexical distance between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and a spoken Arabic vernacular (SAV) on phonological analysis among kindergarten (N=24) and first grade (N=42) native Arabic-speaking children. We tested the effect of the lexical status of the word (SAV, MSA, and pseudoword), as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme (SAV vs. MSA), on initial and final phoneme isolation. Results showed that, when words were composed of SAV phonemes only, the lexical status of the word did not affect phoneme isolation. However, when MSA and pseudowords encoded both SAV and MSA phonemes, kindergarteners found MSA words significantly more difficult to analyze. Comparing children's ability to isolate SAV versus MSA phonemes revealed that all children found MSA phonemes significantly more difficult to isolate. Kindergarteners found MSA phonemes that were embedded within MSA words even more difficult to isolate. Results underscore the role of the lexical status of the stimulus word, as well as the linguistic affiliation of the target phoneme in phonological analysis in a diglossic context.

The role of articulation quality in the development of phonological sensitivity was examined in a 5-year longitudinal study. A sample of 80 children was assessed at age 3. They were assessed yearly to age 6. Forty-three of the original sample were traced and reassessed at age 8. As predicted, the results revealed that articulation quality of the phoneme /r/ predicted phoneme sensitivity for the phoneme /r/ at ages 3–5 after controlling for vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phoneme sensitivity for a control phoneme. Later analyses showed that articulation quality at age 3 explained unique variance in phoneme sensitivity and decoding at age 8, after entering appropriate control variables. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that weakened phonological representations for specific phonemes linger after articulation has normalized.

We introduce an objective method for classifying phonological overlap between Spanish and English translation equivalents. This method then is exploited to examine spoken word recognition using stimuli with graded levels of phonological overlap. Performance by typical English-only speaking (EO) children and English-only children with primary language impairment (LI) is compared to a control group of bilingual Spanish–English peers (BI). Response time and accuracy separated groups, with the BI group outperforming the EO group, who in turn outperformed the LI group. Children with more severe LI are slower than those with mild LI, and LI severity is significantly correlated with speed. The two groups of monolingual children and the LI subgroups respond in a qualitatively similar way to decreasing phonological overlap.

In a series of lexical priming experiments we examined the interaction between spelling processes dedicated to spelling familiar words (lexical processes) and those dedicated to spelling unfamiliar words or nonwords (sublexical processes). Participants listened to lists of intermixed monosyllabic words and nonwords and were required to spell only the nonwords. In the priming condition, nonwords were preceded by real word primes that were phonologically related to the nonwords. In two experiments, we found that the spellings of nonwords could be influenced by previously heard rhyming words, replicating previous work. Furthermore, we examined the mechanism of this lexical/sublexical interaction and found that it is both phonologically and orthographically based and that word primes are most effective when they overlap in word body (vowel+coda) with the nonword. We conclude that lexical and sublexical processes interact in a manner that involves a dynamic updating of sound–spelling correspondences, which, at a minimum, are specified in terms of the word body.

Based on Bates and MacWhinney's competition model, the present study aims to examine the effects of discourse context on sentence interpretation. In my previous study it was found that both Chinese and English monolinguals paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as the determinants for Chinese and English sentence processing. The conclusions obtained in that study have to be considered tentative because the contextual sentences were short and might not have been sufficiently biasing toward the intended interpretation. Hence, the present study was undertaken to further examine the context effects by elaborating the contents of the contextual sentences. The results show that English native speakers rely on discourse context in interpreting their native language to a greater extent than the previous research has suggested and that Chinese native speakers make use of context information to a greater degree than do their English counterparts.

Two competing explanations exist regarding the nature of morphological difficulty in adult second language acquisition: competence deficit versus performance deficiency. This study tested these explanations by examining English as a second language (ESL) learners' morphological performance in reading comprehension tasks. Chinese ESL speakers were asked to read English sentences for comprehension in three self-paced word by word reading experiments. Their reading times were measured to determine if they were sensitive to idiosyncrasies/disagreement in sentences that do and do not involve the number morpheme. The results show that they are not sensitive to number disagreement, but sensitive to other idiosyncrasies tested. This insensitivity to the number morpheme suggests that their morphological knowledge is not an integrated part of their automatic second language competence.

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