This study compared the narrative abilities of mildly mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Twenty mildly mentally retarded children and 20 nonretarded children, matched on mental age, PPVT-R scores, and SES were audiotaped while narrating a wordless picture book story. Results showed no differences between the groups in narrative length, use of tense and conjunctions, and use of narrative devices. However, there were significant differences in use of reference, with the mildly retarded children using more definite article + noun character introductions, showing more pronoun confusion, and more often pronominalizing all references to the story protagonist. Control of reference in narrative is discussed as presenting a particularly challenging set of discourse abilities because it requires the child to integrate knowledge across a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic domains.

Phonological processes have been used to describe children’s speech for a number of years, but the causes of most processes remain unexplained. In a study investigating possible sources of processes in children’s speech, Aitchison and Chiat (1981) suggested that many developmental phonological processes may be a result of problems in lexical storage and retrieval. One limitation of their study, however, was that they had no adult control group, whose results might have helped clarify their findings. The present research with adults was similar to Aitchison and Chiat’s investigation with children and was intended to provide additional information about whether children’s typical phonological processes generally involve lexical storage and recall difficulties. Caution is advised in assuming that children’s spontaneous phonological processes are generally a result of lexical storage and recall factors.

This study investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script – Chinese. Since the Chinese ideographic script can be read with more than one dialectal pronunciation, a reader who has learned to read in two dialects will have two pronunciations for the same word stored in his memory. Thus, interference effects will occur. Sixteen subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese were tested in a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words that were pronounced the same or differently in one or both of the dialects. That automatic phonetic activation would occur even for an ideographic script such as Chinese was supported by the results.

This study investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the actor role in French sentences. Native speakers showed strong use of clitic pronoun agreement, followed by much weaker use of verb agreement, an even weaker use of noun animacy, and negligible use of word order. This ranking reflects the importance of these cues in naturally occurring French sentences involving conflicts among cues in conjunction with a learning-on-error model. The English/French bilinguals did not manifest English-like strategies of word order preference on the French sentences; rather, they showed a cue ranking very similar to that of native speakers, although detectability may have played a role in their use of verb agreement. The failure of English word order strategies to correctly interpret many naturally occurring French sentences may be responsible for the adaptation of strategies appropriate to the second language.

It has recently been suggested that the developmental association between nonword repetition performance and vocabulary knowledge reflects the contribution of phonological memory processes to vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). An alternative account of the association is that the child uses existing vocabulary knowledge to support memory for nonwords. The present article tests between these two alternative accounts by evaluating the role of phonological memory and linguistic factors in nonword repetition. In a longitudinal database, repetition accuracy in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds was found to be sensitive to two independent factors: a phonological memory factor, nonword length, and a linguistic factor, wordlikeness. To explain these combined influences, it is suggested that repeating nonwords involves temporary phonological memory storage which may be supported by either a specific lexical analogy or by an appropriate abstract phonological frame generated from structurally similar vocabulary items.

Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley (1991) present a reanalysis of some of their earlier data concerned with the relationship between nonword repetition and the development of vocabulary knowledge in young children. In the present article we outline some theoretical differences between ourselves and this group in the interpretation of nonword repetition and discuss how best these differences could be resolved.

The opportunity taken by Snowling, Chiat, and Hulme to step into the debate concerning the nature of the relationship between nonword repetition abilities and vocabulary acquisition in young children should be welcomed. Vocabulary size is strongly associated with a range of abilities, including general intelligence scores, reading ability, reading comprehension, and school success (e.g., Anderson & Freebody, 1981) and as a consequence, vocabulary knowledge provides the major index of verbal intelligence in many standardized ability tests used with both children and adults. Given the weight attached by psychologists to vocabulary knowledge, it seems surprising that until recently the cognitive processes underpinning word learning had been largely neglected. Any progress in understanding the psychological constraints in vocabulary development, whether it takes the form of informed theoretical debate or further empirical work, should therefore be encouraged.