This book by Carson Schütze poses an important question. Are grammaticality judgments a reliable source of data for linguistic theories? Grammaticality judgments, reliable or not, have been the main, and most often the only, source of data in linguistic theory for many years. “‘Because many of the relevant structures are fairly complex and simply might not arise in the normal course of conversation, or during observation by an experimenter' (White, 1989, p. 58), UG [Universal Grammar] researchers have generally relied on some form of grammaticality judgment (GJ) task” (Katrien & Lantolf, 1992, p. 32). Katrien and Lantolf (1992) pointed out that with this task linguists try to draw on speakers' intuitions about their competence. Grammaticality judgments consist of questions about whether a sentence is grammatical according to native speakers. Most often, the native speaker is the linguist her- or himself as the only subject. Not only can bias exist when linguists are the source of data for her or his own theories, but also relying on the intuitions of only one speaker limits the credibility of the theory. When more than one speaker is queried, it has been shown that consistency is not always guaranteed: variation among and within speakers is a common feature in judgments (Mohan, 1977; Snow & Meijer, 1977). Idiosyncrasies of the subjects, presentation of the material, and experimenter's procedure are among the factors that contribute to this variation in judgments. An underlying problem in linguistic theorizing comes from the fact that linguists are normally not “trained in methods for getting reliable data” (p. 4). All this results in theories that are not adequately supported. Nonetheless, they are used as a springboard for new theories. Schütze provides linguists with answers to the following questions. What information about language can grammaticality judgments offer? What factors affect the form of these judgments? What can be done to make the best use of these judgments?

This study compared patterns of nonselective cross-language activation in L1 and L2 visual word recognition with different-script bilinguals. The aim was to determine (1) whether lexical processing is nonselective in the L1 (as in L2), and (2) if the same cross-linguistic factors affected processing similarly in each language. To examine the time course of activation, eye movements were tracked during lexical decision. Thirty-two Japanese–English bilinguals responded to 250 target words in Japanese and in English. The same participants and items (i.e., cognate translation equivalents) were used to directly compare L1 and L2 processing. Response latencies as well as eye movements representing early and late processing were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. Similar cross-linguistic effects, namely cognate word frequency, phonological similarity, and semantic similarity, were found in both languages. These factors affected processing to different degrees in each language, however. While cognate frequency was significant as early as the first fixation, effects of cross-linguistic phonological and semantic similarity arose later in time. Increased phonological similarity slowed responses in L2 but speeded them in L1, while greater semantic overlap was facilitatory in both languages. Results are discussed from the perspective of the BIA+ model of visual word recognition.

The beauty of edited volumes is their potential to achieve synergism in bringing together diverse work on a significant topic – not just to create a coherent collection of research. Literacy in African American communities succeeds on all fronts. In presenting a broad view of literacy-related practices, the volume evokes a variable African American community that is invisible (or at least hazy) in many schools. Without deep knowledge of the linguistic, cultural, historical, and political contexts for literacy in the community, the schools and university programs that prepare professionals cannot hope to overcome the deficit perspective of cultural and linguistic differences that still drives assessment and instruction to a large degree.

Bilingual children typically perform more poorly than monolingual children on linguistic tasks but better than monolingual children on cognitive tasks requiring executive function. The present study examined performance on complex linguistic tasks that also required executive functioning for their solution. One hundred 4-year-olds from linguistically diverse backgrounds (36 monolinguals, 64 bilinguals) performed two linguistic tasks in which misleading information needed to be ignored to select the correct answer. Data were analyzed both categorically by comparing the performance of children assigned to monolingual and bilingual groups and continuously in terms of degree of bilingual experience across the entire sample. In the categorical analyses, bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in understanding the meaning of spoken sentences in the presence of distraction in both tasks, and continuous analyses showed that performance was calibrated to degree of bilingualism in one of the tasks, with higher levels of bilingualism being associated with better performance. The interpretation is that attentional control built up through bilingual experience compensates for lower levels of language proficiency in performing these complex linguistic tasks. The study also endorses the use of continuous assessments of bilingualism rather than categorical assignment to groups to obtain more nuanced results.

Emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) quantifies the extent to which an emotion-label word represents emotion concepts. While previous research demonstrated faster recognition for high EmoPro words than low EmoPro words in Spanish, the modulation of EmoPro on emotion word recognition in other languages and its dependence on task demands remain unclear. This study employed both the lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and the valence judgment task (Experiment 2) to investigate the EmoPro effect among Chinese speakers. The results not only confirmed the role of EmoPro in Chinese emotion word recognition, supporting the prototype theory of emotion concepts, but also highlighted that the EmoPro effect was more pronounced in the valence judgment task (an explicit emotion task) than in the lexical decision task (an implicit emotion task). This suggests that EmoPro is associated with the ease of accessing emotion concepts and serves as an affective-semantic variable.

This study examines whether the foreign language effect mitigates reactions to value-inconsistent sociopolitical content. We examined 69 English–Spanish bilinguals and 31 Spanish–English heritage bilinguals, half of whom did the experiment in their native language and half in their second language. Participants were administered a survey in which trial emotiveness was manipulated by using the quantifiers some and all (e.g., Some Trump supporters are racists vs. All Trump supporters are racists). The some-types (n = 30) served as a baseline for the all-types (n = 30). After each target, participants rated their willingness to be prosocial (e.g., holding the door for a stranger) on a scale of 1–7, 1 being totally agree and 7 being totally disagree. Our results suggest that processing emotional information in a second language is less emotional than in a first language and that such a decrease in emotionality results in the neutralization of offense taken. However, individual differences in linguistic profiles across participants, as well as contextual framing, lead to discrete value judgments. Proficiency, learner type, political affiliation, and context type affect willingness to engage in prosocial behavior. As a group, the bilinguals showed no decrease in their willingness to engage in such behaviors, regardless of context type; speakers of higher proficiency and stronger political values increase prosocial sentiment; and lower proficiency and weaker views lead to neutral prosocial sentiment.

Phonological similarity effects are biases to judge words as phonologically similar (i.e., rhyming), even if they are not. First found in rime awareness tasks in preliterates, these biases have recently also been found in proficient adult readers. In this study, we evaluated underlying phonological processing in rime judgment longitudinally, across literacy development. To this end, we created a new rime judgment task (rime; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /z∙aɪ̯∙l/) with two distractor conditions that varied in size of phonological overlap (body; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /t∙aɪ̯ ç/; nucleus; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /r∙aɪ̯∙s/). The task was administered to a group of 61 German-speaking children at four time points across school entry and to 21 adults. Accuracy and latency responses were recorded. Results indicated that children and adults showed phonological similarity effects but the effect decreased gradually over time. However, preliterate children were more sensitive to large compared to small phonological overlap, while the same effect was significantly smaller in literate children and adults. Results suggest that preliterate children are more sensitive to larger grain sizes and become more sensitive to fine-grained units across literacy development. The findings are in line with the assumptions of the psycholinguistic grain size theory.

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.

The Mandarin Ba-construction is one of the most challenging constructions for L2 learners. The present study attributes the difficulty in developing the taxonomic representation of the Ba-construction to the interference of competing constructions. I conducted a syntactic priming experiment to investigate the representational relationship between the Ba-construction and its SVO counterpart in native Mandarin speakers and L2 Mandarin learners with or without the equivalent of the Ba-construction in their L1. It was found that native speakers and L2 learners whose L1 features a structure equivalent to the Ba-construction represented the two constructions distinctly, manifesting as a resistance to priming and a robust syntactic preference for the Ba-construction in the picture description task. Conversely, L2 learners whose L1 does not possess an equivalent of the Ba-construction were sensitive to syntactic priming, which indicates a lack of taxonomic representations of the Ba-construction in relation to its SVO counterpart. Such reduced differentiation between the two target constructions suggests a blocking effect that stems from L1 interference.

Younger readers, mean age 6;11, and older readers, mean age 8;7, matched on IQ and SES, read 18 consonant phonemes embedded in nonsense CVCs. Results indicated that (a) within groups, younger readers made significantly more errors on digraphs than graphs; (b) younger readers made significantly more errors on graphs in the final position; (c) there was no position effect for either group in reading digraphs. Analysis of errors based on the number of distinctive features shared within stimulus-response pairs revealed that (a) on graphs, both groups made significantly more errors that shared two distinctive features; (b) on digraphs, the majority of errors for younger readers shared one distinctive feature; (c) the predominant strategy on digraphs for both groups was to read one letter. These findings demonstrate that most oral reading errors produced by beginning readers are not random, but rather are systematically related to the stimulus.