American Sign Language (ASL) provides a unique opportunity to investigate the effects of late exposure to a primary language on adult linguistic processing. In Experiment 1, a video sign-monitoring task was used to investigate the grammatical sensitivity of 11 native signers (exposed to ASL from birth) and 10 late signers (exposed to ASL at a mean age of 12 years) to errors in ASL verb agreement. The results indicated that native signers, but not late signers, were sensitive to errors in verb agreement. Experiment 2 utilized both sign monitoring and off-line grammaticality judgments. Sentences which contained errors in either verb agreement or temporal aspect were presented to 10 native signers, 10 early signers (exposed to ASL between the ages of 2 and 7), and 10 late signers (exposed to ASL between the ages of 10 and 20). The results indicated that native signers were sensitive to errors in both verb agreement and aspect, and that early and late signers were only sensitive to errors in aspect morphology. In the off-line grammaticality test, all three groups were equally able consciously to detect the grammatical errors. These findings suggest that late exposure to a primary language affects the on-line integration of verb agreement information within a sentence, but does not affect sensitivity to semantic distinctions encoded by aspect morphology.

Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Alverson and Rosenberg (1990) reviewed this technique. Such analyses properly imply the necessity and value of a broad approach to language and language use. To be optimally useful, cohesion analysis must be seen in its theoretical context. Cohesion is one means of creating text, and therefore it cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. Cohesion may realize elements of register and code, but these concepts are distinct and account for different kinds of variation in language use. As a research tool, cohesion is one initial step of linguistic analysis that can meet the dual criteria of both an analysis of language in context and in reliability.

This article reports on a longitudinal examination of the relationship between productive phonological ability and phonological awareness in children under 6 years of age. This study followed 45 subjects with variant productive phonology levels from the mean age of 3;6 to 6;0. The Khan-Lewis Phonological Analysis (KLPA) (Khan & Lewis, 1976), which ranks children from 0 to 4 on phonological process usage, was given at 6-month intervals, along with two measures of phonological awareness. Logit analysis showed that children with poor productive phonology, as measured by process usage, had a lower probability of meeting criterion on both of the phonological awareness measures. Further, a change in KLPA rank from poor to good speech predicted significant exponential increases in the probability of success on the two dependent variables. We concluded that, as a child matures in productive phonology, accompanying exponential growth in phonological awareness occurs.

The segmentation strategies used by native and non-native listeners of French were examined in two phoneme-monitoring experiments which required the subjects to detect the presence of word-initial /t/ in potential liaison phrases (e.g., excellent tableau/excellent acteur) and in non-liaison phrases (e.g., vrai tableau/vrai acteur). The essentially faultless performance of the natives suggested that the optimal segmentation routine in such phrases is primarily based on the identification of the critical word and, to a lesser extent, on the contextual information, which was more efficiently used to check the outcome of word recognition. In contrast, non-natives tended to rely on guessing strategies, not based on contextual information (contrary to the widely held language teaching recommendation), but on an incomplete acoustic–phonetic/lexical analysis of the signal.

Most research on dyslexia deals with native speakers of English. This study, however, investigates the specific symptoms of acquired surface dyslexia in Hebrew. It is assumed that Hebrew has a number of distinctive properties that would affect the definition of symptoms differently from those in English. In this study, four acquired surface dyslexic adults were compared with eight normal second graders in terms of reading strategy. The comparison was carried out mainly to discover whether certain symptoms were specific to surface dyslexia or whether they were normal in reading acquisition and thus could be defined in terms of a general non-lexical strategy of reading. Two main conclusions emerged from this research study. (1) Homophones and homographs were a major source of difficulty for native Hebrew surface dyslexic readers; vowel misreadings were the most common error. These phenomena were not common to English surface dyslexia, where difficulty with irregular words is the main symptom and regularization errors are the most frequent. It should be noted, however, that difficulty with homophones also occurs in English surface dyslexia. (2) The normal second graders tended to read using a non-lexical strategy. Their reading was similar to that of surface dyslexic subjects.

Two commonly applied methods of differentially classifying language-delayed children as either specifically language impaired or developmental lag language impaired (i.e., children with low IQ and low language performance) were examined for stability over 1-and 2-year periods. One classification method, following the DSM III.R guidelines, was based on an absolute cut-off level for performance on a measure of cognitive ability, in conjunction with other exclusionary criteria (i.e., language delay that is not the result of hearing loss, social– emotional disorder, etc.). The second classification method included the same absolute cut-off for cognitive ability as the DSM III-R guidelines, but it also required that a minimum relative difference be present between the general cognitive performance and the language performance. These two methods were examined for differences in classification of children, as well as for stability of classification across time. We used the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities Perceptual-Performance Index as the cognitive measure and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised and the Test of Early Language Development as language performance measures. Results indicated significant differences in classification between the two methods of defining SLI, as well as substantial changes in classification over time using either method. Alternative classification systems are discussed.