This paper addresses verbal performance and overuse of “not fully lexical verbs” by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and peers with typical language development (TLD). Experimental data come from picture-naming and retell narratives. Fourteen school-aged children with SLI (mean age = 6 years, 9 months) participated alongside 50 language- and age-matched peers with TLD. The results revealed that children with SLI do not use light verb constructions but only general all-purpose (GAP) verbs when unable to produce single-word, specific lexical verbs. Moreover, they do not differ from language-matched TLD children in this respect. As such, GAP verbs should be viewed as symptoms of immature language or absent representations rather than impaired language. Consequently, when discussing not fully lexical verbs productions in (a)typical development, researchers should make the fundamental distinction between GAP verbs and light verbs, and focus on GAP verbs as the relevant category in SLI.

While there is a consensus that speakers plan their utterances before they start producing them, the scope of the initial planning unit remains controversial. In subject-initial utterances, is the planning unit the whole subject phrase or a smaller “functional phrase” within the subject phrase? Allum and Wheeldon (2007) reported that speakers show faster onset latencies in producing utterances like The flower above the house is red, where the subject consists of two functional phrases (the flower and above the house) than in producing The flower and the house are red, where there is a single, longer functional phrase (The flower and the house), both in head-initial languages like English and head-final languages like Japanese. This has been taken to suggest that the functional phrase is a preferred unit of planning, rather than the whole subject. Experiment 1 in the present study replicates Allum and Wheeldon's study with speakers of another head-final language (Mandarin Chinese) and finds similar results. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate whether syntactic processing or visual grouping could potentially explain the pattern of responses, and find that they cannot. Together, these results provide further empirical support for the claim that the functional phrase is a primary unit of grammatical planning for speech production.

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4–8. The results revealed between- and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was found to be predictive of reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that the CALS construct and instrument appear promising for exploring students’ school-relevant language skills.

To better understand how talker-specific information influences spoken language processing in different experimental listening tasks, we examined the effect of a foreign accent on preschoolers’ word recognition and story comprehension. In Experiment 1, preschoolers listening to words presented by a native-accented talker recognized significantly more words than did preschoolers listening to words presented by a foreign-accented talker. In Experiment 2, preschoolers listening to a story narrated by a native-accented talker demonstrated significantly lower comprehension accuracy compared to preschoolers listening to a foreign-accented narrator. These findings underscore the importance of the experimental task when examining and making claims about the influence of accent information on young children's spoken language processing.

This study investigated whether learning a second language (L2) has a facilitative effect on first language (L1) literacy and whether there is an advantage to learning an L2 with transparent grapheme–phoneme correspondences. One hundred fifty Year 3 children were randomly assigned into one of three groups: L2 Italian, L2 French, and control. Children were pretested on measures of English (L1) spelling, reading and phonological processing. The L2 groups then received 15 weeks of L2 instruction in Italian or French, respectively. The L2 groups outperformed the control group on posttest measures of English reading accuracy and different aspects of phonological processing. In addition, there was an advantage for the L2 Italian group as their scores were higher than the L2 French group on English reading accuracy and phonological processing.

The present study compared production and on-line comprehension of definite articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns in Greek-speaking typically developing, sequential bilingual (L2-TD) children and monolingual children with specific language impairment (L1-SLI). Twenty Turkish Greek L2-TD children, 16 Greek L1-SLI children, and 31 L1-TD Greek children participated in a production task examining definite articles and clitic pronouns and, in an on-line comprehension task, involving grammatical sentences with definite articles and clitics and sentences with grammatical violations induced by omitted articles and clitics. The results showed that the L2-TD children were sensitive to the grammatical violations despite low production. In contrast, the children with SLI were not sensitive to clitic omission in the on-line task, despite high production. These results support a dissociation between production and on-line comprehension in L2 children and for impaired grammatical representations and lack of automaticity in children with SLI. They also suggest that on-line comprehension tasks may complement production tasks by differentiating between the language profiles of L2-TD children and children with SLI.

This study investigated the possible influence of first language (L1) collocational patterns on second language (L2) collocational processing. A lexical decision task was used to assess whether collocational patterns acceptable in the L1 but not the L2 would still be activated when processing language entirely in the L2. The results revealed no such activation. Furthermore, L2 speakers did not produce accelerated processing for control collocations that were acceptable in the L2 but not the L1. Based on these findings, we put forth some theoretical suggestions regarding recent research indicating accelerated processing for congruent over incongruent collocations. Finally, our NS control group revealed some unexpected tendencies that cannot be easily accounted for with our current understanding of L1 language processing.

Language use and joint attention (JA) strategies were examined during interactions between francophone mothers and fathers and either their birth children (n = 10) or their internationally adopted children from China (n = 8), once when the children were 15 months old and again at 20 months, on average. Results showed that mothers engaged in more JA episodes and tended to talk more with their children than did fathers; however, this was influenced by the language-learning situation of the child. Specifically, the adoptive parents engaged more with their children than did the birth parents, and the behaviors of the internationally adopted mothers and fathers were more similar to each other than to those of the birth parents, arguably to support their children's unique language-learning situation. However, in contrast to a previous study that examined JA with adoptive mothers, the adoptive fathers’ interaction styles with their children at 15 months were not related to children's vocabularies at 20 months as has been observed for mothers.

This study investigates the automatization of sentence processing using the coefficient of variation (CV), a measure of intraindividual processing stability (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993). A smaller CV (i.e., standard deviation to reaction time [RT] ratio) and a positive CV-RT correlation are taken to index increased automatization. Hulstijn, Van Gelderen, and Schoonen (2009) were the first to try to validate the use of CV at the sentence level; however, they did not find any evidence for automatization in their CV analyses. Forty Korean English as a second language students (20 intermediate, 20 advanced) and 20 native speakers performed three speeded tasks in English: a semantic classification task, a sentence verification task, and a sentence construction task. The results revealed that, consistent with findings from previous word recognition studies, the CV in the sentence-level tasks decreased as participants’ proficiency level increased. Although the CV-RT correlation in the sentence verification task was not always significant, no counterevidence against Segalowitz and Segalowitz’ (1993) hypothesis was found. The sentence construction task discriminated better between groups than the sentence verification task. We argue that the CV may be a valid measure of automatization at the sentence level, provided the tasks used target lower-level processes such as word recognition, parsing, and semantic proposition formation.