Children's bilingual status is important because the interest here is in narrative performance in both languages of bilingual children, in particular the within-subject, cross language comparisons. As Paradis (2010) has argued, there are some structures where performance differences will point to a temporary lack of opportunity for mastery, whereas other structures will be markers of underlying difficulties. We expect the discriminators to be language specific, depending on attested vulnerabilities for each of the languages involved. Narratives were examined for macrostructure (goals, attempts, and outcomes), microstructure (e.g., length, lexis, and morphosyntax), and mental state terms (MSTs). Thirty-one preschool children (TLD = 19, SLI = 12) retold stories accompanied by six pictures that were matched across content (Baby Birds/Baby Goats) and to the extent possible across languages (first language/second language) for macrostructure, microstructure, and MSTs in the framework of the Working Group on Narrative and Discourse Abilities in COST Action 0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment. The macrostructure results confirmed previous findings showing similar performance in both languages for children with TLD and those diagnosed with SLI. Consistent with previous findings on narrative abilities among bilingual children, microstructure analysis of verbal productivity, length of communication units, and lexical diversity distinguished children with TLD from those with SLI. An analysis of MSTs yielded more MSTs in children's second language, in particular more mental verbs. The most prevalent MSTs used in all narratives were early acquired perceptual and motivational verbs (“see” and “want”). Overall, distinctions between narratives of children with TLD and SLI were found primarily for microstructure features, where error analysis was particularly important in uncovering possible markers, especially in second languages.

The present study examines the role of the relative transparency of Portuguese and Spanish orthographies in schoolchildren's word recognition procedures. Both Portuguese and Spanish may be considered as transparent orthographies. However, mappings at the grapheme–phoneme level are more consistent in Spanish than in Portuguese. Four groups of Portuguese and Spanish children from grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, who had been taught to read using a phonics-based approach, were given a Portuguese and a Spanish version of three different continuous reading tasks: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. Reading time per item was measured and errors noted. Improvement in reading time was observed in both orthographies from grades 1 to 4. There were no errors in numeral recognition and few children made errors in reading the number words. In pseudoword reading, the Spanish children were faster and made fewer errors than the Portuguese children. Errors in pseudoword reading were scored as phonological when leading to the production of another pseudoword and as lexical when involving refusals and/or the production of a real word. Portuguese children made more phonological errors than the Spanish group, and there was no difference in the number of lexical errors. The results are discussed in terms of the role played by the differing orthographic transparency of Spanish and Portuguese in young readers' word recognition procedures.

Young infants perceive a variety of speech contrasts, even those that are not relevant in their own language environment. Evidence regarding the loss of perceptual ability with phonologically irrelevant contrasts is reviewed and a theoretical distinction is advanced. It is proposed that the perception of “fragile” contrasts is lost in infancy due to lack of exposure to particular sounds, while the perception of “robust” contrasts is lost around the onset of formal language training due to lack of experience with phonologically irrelevant contrasts. This distinction should provide a heuristic framework for future research on the development of speech perception.

This study investigated the role of awareness in different learning conditions in relation to second language (L2) development. Adult learners of Spanish were exposed to past conditional sentences in one of five versions of a computerized problem-solving task that vary in their degree of explicitness. By employing both on-line and off-line data elicitation procedures, two main issues were addressed: whether exposure to L2 input under different conditions had a differential impact on learners' awareness and whether different levels of awareness influenced learners' ability to recognize and produce new exemplars of the target structure immediately after exposure to the input and over time. Results indicated that higher levels of awareness were not only associated with more explicit conditions but were also substantially more effective than lower levels.

The present investigation explores the hypothesis that lexical information influences performance on nonword repetition tasks. The subjects – 30 normally achieving, school-aged boys – repeated multisyllabic nonword pairs, constructed to vary only in the lexicality of their constituent stressed syllables. Nonwords with stressed syllables corresponding to real words were repeated significantly more accurately than nonwords with non-lexical stressed syllables; stressed syllable lexicality primarily influenced repetition of the remaining unstressed syllables. Subsequent analyses revealed that the overwhelming majority of repetition errors operated to transform non-lexical sequences into real words, even when doing so violated both strong acoustic cues and articulatory ease. We conclude that lexical long-term memory information intrudes on nonword repetition performance, including stimuli that are within the limits of immediate memory span. These results suggest a number of caveats concerning the construction and interpretation of nonword repetition tasks and raise questions about the role of such tasks in assessing phonological working memory.

This study examined the English vowel productions of 240 native speakers of Italian who had arrived in Canada at ages ranging from 2 to 23 years and 24 native English speakers from the same community. The productions of 11 vowels were rated for degree of foreign accent by 10 listeners. An increase in perceived accentedness as a function of increasing age of arrival was observed on every vowel. Not one of the vowels was observed to be produced in a consistently native-like manner by the latest-arriving learners, even though they had been living in Canada for an average of 32 years. However, high intelligibility (percent correct identification) scores were obtained for the same set of productions. This was true even for English vowels that have no counterpart in Italian.

This study examined the role of phonological memory in second language (L2) grammar learning in a group of native French-speaking children undergoing a 5-month intensive English program. Phonological memory (as referenced by Arabic [ANWR] and English [ENWR] nonword repetition tasks), L2 vocabulary (receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge), and L2 grammar (knowledge of morphosyntactic structures) were assessed during the first (Time 1) and last (Time 2) month of the program. After controlling for initial grammar ability, phonological memory significantly predicted grammar development (27.9% of variance explained) in addition to the contribution made by vocabulary knowledge (9.5% of variance explained). Although phonological memory ability as measured by ENWR increased between Time 1 and Time 2, ANWR did not improve. The findings show that phonological memory plays an important role in L2 grammar development that is unmediated by lexical knowledge. They also provide evidence that phonological memory improves with language development, but that basic phonological memory capacity (as measured by ANWR in this study) remains unchanged over time.

The use of complex syntax was investigated in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome (n = 24) and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Both groups used conjoined and subordinate sentence forms and did not differ significantly in either the proportion of utterances containing complex sentences or in the variety of complex sentence types used. The analysis of developmental patterns suggested a similar order of acquisition across groups. The findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple syntax. This study does not support earlier findings of a critical period effect in syntactic development in Down syndrome based on age or syntactic complexity.

This study examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English–Chinese bilinguals. Our results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese–English bilinguals transfer animacybased strategies to English sentences; late English–Chinese bilinguals transfer English-like word order strategies to Chinese. Early bilinguals display a variety of transfer patterns, including differentiation (use of animacy strategies in Chinese and word order strategies in English) and backward transfer (use of L2 processing strategies in L1, a possible symptom of language loss). These unusual transfer patterns reflect a complex interaction of variables, including age of exposure to L2 and patterns of daily language use. Implications of these findings for the critical period hypothesis are discussed, together with some new hypotheses concerning the interaction between acquisition of L2 and maintenance of L1.

The two experiments reported here investigated the processing of English wh- questions by native speakers of English and advanced Chinese, German, and Korean learners of English as a second language. Performance was evaluated in relation to parsing strategies and sensitivity to plausibility constraints. In an on-line plausibility judgment task, both native and non-native speakers behaved in similar ways. All groups postulated a gap at the first position consistent with the grammar, as predicted by the filler-driven strategy and as shown by garden path or filled-gap effects that were induced when the hypothesized gap location turned out to be incorrect. In addition, all subjects interpreted the plausibility of the filler-gap dependency, as shown by a reduction in the garden path effect when the initial analysis was implausible. However, the native speakers' reading profiles showed evidence of a more immediate effect of plausibility than those of the non-native speakers, suggesting that they initiated reanalysis earlier when the first analysis was implausible. Experiment 2 showed that the non-native speakers had difficulty canceling a plausible gap hypothesis even in an off-line (pencil and paper) task, whereas for the native speakers there was no evidence that the sentences caused difficulty in this situation. The results suggest that native and non-native speakers employ similar strategies in immediate on-line processing and hence are garden-pathed in similar ways, but they differ in their ability to recover from misanalysis.

Word identification, which is the retrieval of the linguistic constituents (phonological, semantic) of a word, plays a central role in children's reading development. This development includes the automatization of word decoding and the attainment of fluent reading levels, both essential for skilled reading with comprehension (Perfetti, 1992; Stanovich, 2000; Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2009). In learning to read, children first acquire elementary decoding skills, and then gradually apply these skills with greater accuracy and speed, leading to an increasingly automated process of that recognizes multiletter units (consonant clusters, syllables, and morphemes) and whole words (Ehri, 2005). Automatic word recognition enables the devotion of mental resources to the meaning of a text and thus allows readers to use reading as a tool for the acquisition of new information and knowledge (Perfetti, 1998; Stanovich, 2000).

This paper examined the fundamental frequency variation in the narratives of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typical controls matched on age, IQ, and verbal abilities. Study 1 found increased fundamental frequency variation in the speech of 21 children and adolescents with HFA when compared to 21 typical controls. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 with a younger sample of 17 children with HFA and 17 typical controls. In addition, Study 1 found evidence that acoustic measurements of prosody were related to clinical judgments of autism-specific communication impairments, although this was not replicated in Study 2. Taken together, these studies provide evidence for differences in expressive prosody in individuals with HFA that can be measured objectively.

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target language from birth (monolinguals, L1 attriters) with late L2 learners, on the one hand, and bilinguals (L1 attriters, L2ers) with monolinguals, on the other hand, allowed us to disentangle the impacts of age of onset and bilingualism in speech production. At the group level, the attriters performed indistinguishably from controls, and both differed from the L2 group. However, 80% of all L2ers scored within the native (attriter) range. Correlational analyses with background factors further found some effects of use and language aptitude. These results show that acquiring a language from birth is not sufficient to guarantee nativelike pronunciation, and late acquisition does not necessarily prevent it. The results are discussed in the light of models on the role of age and cross-linguistic influence in L2 acquisition.

Child first-language (L1) learners frequently use the definite article in referential indefinite contexts, that is, with nouns appearing in the discourse for the first time, where adults use the indefinite article. Adult second-language (L2) learners also overgeneralize the definite article. Research reported here shows 30 L2 learners use the in referential indefinite contexts at significantly higher rates than in nonreferential contexts. Thus, both L1 and L2 learners may share an initial hypothesis associating the with referential nouns. This evidence of a strategy common to L1 and L2 learners invites reinterpretation of both L1 and L2 acquisition data.

The experiments presented here used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981) to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable (e.g., BA) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., BALANCE). The target was either a consonant–vowel (CV) or consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. Skilled adult readers showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets corresponded to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not), but this occurred only when the carrier words had low printed frequencies. First grade readers did not show a syllable compatibility effect when tested in February of the first year of schooling; only target length influenced detection times. When tested four months later (June), however, the children with the highest scores on a reading ability test did show a syllable compatibility effect. These results suggest that reading instruction rapidly allows syllable-sized units to be accessed from print, and that this type of coding continues to influence how adult readers process low frequency words.

Fifty-four students were followed over 10 years beginning in first grade to determine best predictors of oral and written second language (L2) proficiency. Predictor variables included measures of first language (L1) skill administered in first through fifth grades, L1 academic aptitude, L2 aptitude (Modern Language Aptitude Test), and L2 affect (motivation, anxiety). All participants completed 2 years of L2 study in high school. Findings revealed strong correlations between early L1 skills and later L2 proficiency, but the Modern Language Aptitude Test was the best predictor of overall L2 proficiency and most L2 proficiency subtests. However, L1 word decoding was the best predictor of L2 word decoding skills. Early L1 skills, L2 motivation, or L2 anxiety added a small amount of variance to the prediction models. Findings suggested that language-related variables are the most robust predictors of L2 proficiency. Results are discussed in the context of long-term cross linguistic transfer of early L1 skills to later L2 aptitude and L2 proficiency.

The aim of this study was to identify potential clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children with SLI by using the Greek version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Twenty-one Greek-speaking monolingual and 15 bilingual children with SLI participated, along with monolingual (N = 21) and bilingual (N = 15) age-matched children with typical development. Results showed differences between typically development children and children with SLI in microstructure, while bilingual children with SLI were found to attain similar levels of performance, and even to outperform monolingual children with SLI, in macrostructure. It is suggested that the retelling coding scheme could permit differential diagnosis of SLI among bilingual children within the scope of narrative assessment.

Despite acknowledgement of the limited English vocabularies demonstrated by many language minority (LM) learners, few studies have identified skills that relate to variation in vocabulary growth in this population. This study investigated the concurrent development of morphological awareness (i.e., students’ understanding of complex words as combinations of meaningful smaller units) and vocabulary for LM learners in early adolescence. A cohort of Spanish-speaking LM learners (n = 90) was followed from fourth through seventh grade and assessed annually. Latent growth modeling results indicated a strong relationship between rates of growth in the two skills, such that learners with rapid growth in derivational morphological awareness also demonstrated rapid growth in vocabulary. Despite positive vocabulary growth during this period, the learners remained far below national norms. Findings highlight the need for language-focused instructional intervention for this population and suggest that morphological awareness may be a promising point of leverage for such instruction.

Groups of good and poor readers at second-grade level were tested for comprehension of adjectival constructions of the John is eager/easy to please types and of center-embedded relative clause constructions. The poor readers were inferior to good readers in understanding O-type adjectives (easy) but not S-type (eager). As well, they were poorer at comprehending embedded sentences, but only when the sentences described improbable events, ones which reversed the normal subject/object roles. When either noun could, on pragmatic grounds, assume either role, both groups fared equally well. The results are interpreted as casting doubt on recent assertions that deficient use of a phonetic memory code underlies the syntactic inferiority often seen in poor readers. A more pervasive linguistic immaturity is suggested as being involved.

This study examined whether measures used to identify children at risk for reading failure are appropriate for children from different language backgrounds. Tasks assessing literacy and phonological and language processing at the beginning and end of kindergarten were administered to 540 native English speakers (NS), 59 bilingual children (BL), and 60 children whose initial exposure to English was when they began school (ESL). Although the BL and ESL children performed more poorly than the NS children on most measures of phonological and linguistic processing, the acquisition of basic literacy skills for children with different language backgrounds developed in a similar manner. Furthermore, planned contrasts between the language groups did not explain the variance in the children's literacy performance in May. Instead, alphabetic knowledge and phonological processing were important contributors to early reading skill. Therefore, children learning English may acquire literacy skills in English in a similar manner to NS children, although their alphabetic knowledge may precede and facilitate the acquisition of phonological awareness in English.