The purpose of this study was to investigate early literacy acquisition in a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences. It was considered that Turkish, with its systematic phonological and orthographic structure, would make different demands on the beginning reader than the languages used in many of the previous studies of literacy acquisition. First grade children were assessed using tests of phonological awareness, letter recognition, word and pseudoword recognition, spelling, syntactic awareness, and listening comprehension at the beginning of the school year. The impact of these factors on the development of word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension was examined. The results strongly suggest that a phonologically transparent orthography fosters the early development of word recognition skills, and that phonological awareness contributes to word recognition in the early stages of reading acquisition. Once the children's word recognition performance is high, listening comprehension ability distinguishes the different levels of reading comprehension among children. These patterns of results were interpreted as reflecting the phonological and orthographic characteristics of the Turkish language and orthography.

The acquisition of the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs was examined longitudinally in nine young children of deaf parents. In monthly home visit sessions, the parents demonstrated on videotape how their children formed the different signs in their lexicons. According to these parental reports, handshapes were produced accurately in 49.8% of the children's different signs. Accuracy of handshape production typically improved with the children's increasing age and vocabulary size. Four basic handshapes (/5, G, B, A/) predominated in the children's early sign productions. Measures of the children's handshape production accuracy, ordinal position of initial production, and frequency of production were used to describe the order in which handshapes were most often acquired. It was also observed that the part of the hand involved in contacting a sign's location often affected the accuracy of the handshapes being produced.

The bilingual child is seen as a unique source of information about the relation between input and intake. The strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning was examined for 25 simultaneous bilingual infants (ages 8 to 30 months) with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, standardized parent report forms in English and Spanish, the percentage of all words that were known in each language was calculated and then plotted against the estimates of language input (also in percentages). A significant correlation was found, r(25)= .82, p < .001. The correlation was also strong when examined point-by-point, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20%; between observations, although it was not reliable at lower levels of exposure to Spanish. Especially for children with less input in the minority language, the factors which appeared to affect the strength of the association between input and amount learned in a language are discussed.

Six experiments examined the role of metaphorical knowledge in people's use and understanding of euphemisms and offensive expressions. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that familiar euphemisms and dysphemisms are viewed as more appropriate and are easier to comprehend when there is a conceptual match between them and the context. The data from Experiments 3 and 4 showed a similar pattern for novel euphemisms and offensive phrases. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out the hypothesis that the previous results were due to semantic priming. The findings from these experiments indicate that people's metaphorical conceptualization of a certain topic can influence the processing time and appropriate use of euphemistic and dysphemistic expressions.

In the traditional gating technique, subjects hear increasing amounts of word-onset information from spoken words until the words can be correctly identified. The experiment reported here contrasted word-onset gating with results when words were gated from their word endings. A significant recognition advantage for words gated from their onsets was demonstrated. This effect was eliminated, however, when we took into account the number of word possibilities that shared overlapping phonology and the same stress pattern as the target words at their recognition points. These results support the position that the perceptual advantage of word-initial information can be understood within a general goodness-of-fit model of spoken word recognition.

This Study investigated whether the pseudoword repetition difference between poor and normal readers could be explained by differences in memory for verbal materials or in familiarity with the composition of verbal materials. Dutch second graders and poor readers scoring in the same range on a word-reading test repeated pseudowords that varied in length and wordlikeness. The pseudoword repetition deficit of poor readers reported in the literature was replicated. Although the repetition scores were influenced by pseudoword length and wordlikeness, no interaction with reader group was found, thus indicating that neither variable represented a causal factor in the poor readers' repetition deficit. Statistical correction for reader group differences on a phoneme detection task and an auditory discrimination task made the pseudoword repetition difference disappear. We conclude that the basic problem is unlikely to be with subvocal rehearsal, and that the cause of the repetition deficit is already operative in early, perceptual stages of processing.