Reading acquisition was related to phonological sensitivity and rapid naming in a longitudinal study with young children. Phonological assessment consisted of rhyme and initial consonant discrimination, while the rapid naming tasks were made up of pictures, letters, and numbers. The subjects were 95 children from two grade levels, primary and first grade. They were tested in the fall and spring of the first year and the spring of the second year. It was found that the phonological and rapid naming tests each predicted unique variance in reading attainment, as measured at the end of the second year of the study. The rapid naming responses became more automatic early in the first grade year, while naming times generally became faster. Although many researchers regard rapid naming as part of the phonological core, the present article discusses the various advantages of considering rapid naming as a separate factor in reading development.

To examine possible explanations of the reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, we compared the repetitions of 54 children with SLI and their peers in terms of number and type of error as well as latency and duration of response. We found no evidence of differences between the groups in auditory discrimination or response processes, but we did find some evidence suggesting differences in either the formation or storage of phonological representations in working memory. Because repetition accuracy was significantly correlated with expressive, but not receptive, measures of language, we hypothesized that the problem lay with the nature of phonological representations in working memory and not with the ability to hold phonological information in working memory.

This study explores the notion that learned associations based on lexical co-occurrence probability influence sentence planning and, consequently, may contribute to the ability of aphasic speakers to produce well-formed sentences. To encourage aphasic speakers to rely on such associations, the subjects were administered a sentence generation task in which an uninflected transitive verb was the sole basis for sentence planning. Performance by normal control speakers was used to identify verb-noun pairs reflecting some degree of lexical association. The aphasic subjects tended to use proportionately fewer associated word pairs in their sentences. The level of associate use was not correlated with either their picture naming scores or their performance on a test of semantic judgment. Finally, despite the aphasic subjects' below normal production of associated word pairs on sentence generation, when nouns associated with the target verbs were included in the sentences, performance was less anomalous for each subject. These findings are used to explore how a network of lexical associates might facilitate sentence processing.

Do differences among first languages (LI) affect word recognition in reading a second language (L2)? Participants in this study had either Indonesian (an alphabetic language) or Chinese (a logographic language) as an L1 and were learning English (an alphabetic language) as an L2. Under the connectionist rubric, it was predicted that an alphabetic LI would facilitate word recognition in an alphabetic L2, especially if the LI and L2 have similar spelling patterns. Facilitation is relative to a logographic LI. The model also predicted a better recognition for high-frequency words in the L2 relative to low-frequency words. The results of a lexical decision task largely confirmed these hypotheses.

We develop the distinction between “referential” and “modalizing” aspects of language and describe their functional dissociation, as observed in various manifestations of aphasia and in the speech of hemispherectomy and commissurotomy patients. Such a frequently observable dissociation is taken to reflect certain cognitive and neurobiological distinctions that do not seem to be accounted for by the structurally motivated linguistic models currently utilized in neurolinguistic studies. The dissociation appears to generate fresh and original insights when applied to acquired language impairments.

This article investigates the discourse coherence of school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI). The following dimensions of discourse are analyzed: topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness (including referencing), conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. The personal narratives of the children in the experimental group were compared with those produced by two groups of children with normal language development, one group matched by chronological age and the other matched by language level. The narratives of the children with SLI were significantly impaired compared with both control groups with respect to all five dimensions of narration, although impairment was far more pronounced for topic maintenance, event sequencing, and implicitness than it was for conjunctive cohesion or fluency. The former serious impairments place a heavy burden on listeners. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.

Chinese script is often viewed as an exception to the processes of language learning in that it is presumed to be learned by rote. However, recent psycholinguistic investigations describing the formal and functional constraints of Chinese script have offered a new direction for a cognitive analysis of its acquisition. We investigated children's understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in a task of judgment of orthographic acceptability and a creative spelling task. The formal constraint we examined was the fixed position of stroke patterns and their function as either a semantic radical (giving a clue to meaning) or a phonological component (giving a clue to pronunciation). The children (aged 4 to 9) attended either kindergarten or primary school in Hong Kong. Our results indicated that 6-year-olds could already use the positional rule to reject nonwords (which violate the formal constraint of position) as unacceptable, whereas pseudowords (which do not violate this constraint) were judged as acceptable. Significant effects of age and orthographic acceptability were observed. The task of creative writing replicated this trend and showed that, from age 6, the children were able to use semantic radicals to represent meaning. However, a more systematic use of phonological components as a clue to pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds. We conclude that learning to read and write in Chinese is not simply accomplished by the rote memorization of individual characters: rather, as children progress in learning, they develop an understanding of the underlying rules of written Chinese.

This study examined whether books that are typically read to preschool children contain theory of mind concepts. The parents of 47 preschool children recorded books read by or to their child over a one-week period. The books were analyzed for theory of mind content. It was found that 78% of the books contained internal state language, 34% contained false beliefs, and 43% contained personality descriptors. Thus, theory of mind concepts appear to be an integral part of the literature read to preschool children. These results are discussed in light of recent work on individual differences in theory of mind development.

The spelling skills of grade 3 children who had received whole language instruction since they began to learn to read were compared with those of grade 3 children attending a phonics program. The children were asked to spell a list of words and nonwords. Overall, the phonics group produced more accurate word spellings than the whole language group. In addition, the phonics children's spellings of nonwords included more conventional, phonologically accurate patterns. There were no group differences on measures of orthographic acceptability or on preservation of skeletal structure.

This study investigates, from a task-based approach and at a morphological level, Tomlin and Villa's (1994) fine-grained analysis of attention in second language acquisition. Four groups of beginning learners of Spanish completed one of four crossword puzzles designed to isolate the effects of alertness, orientation, and detection. Repeated-measures ANOVAs performed on the raw scores obtained on the pretest and three posttests of a recognition and written production task revealed significant main effects for type of attentional function, time, and significant interactions. The results lend strong empirical support to Tomlin and Villa's (1994) fine-grained analysis of attention while indicating short-term effects of detection.

In two experiments, poor and normal Dutch readers, matched for reading age, were presented with visual matching tasks on a computer screen. In Experiment 1, word and pseudoword letter strings were used. The strings consisted of either uppercase/lowercase congruent (e.g., o/O) or uppercase/lowercase incongruent letters (e.g., a/A). Poor readers needed significantly more time to decode uppercase/lowercase incongruent pairs, especially when the pairs consisted of pseudowords. Experiment 2 investigated whether this effect was phonologically or visually mediated. Strings of letters, digit strings, and abstract figure symbols were used. Letter strings included words, pseudowords, and nonwords. Poor readers needed more time to match incongruent letter case pairs, consistent with Experiment 1. Poor readers performed more poorly on letter and digit string matching but not on the figure–symbol matching task. No evidence was found for the differential use of orthographic information in terms of multiletter constraints. The combined data on the letter, digit, and graphic symbol matching experiments suggest that an inadequate command of grapheme–phoneme associations is a critical factor in reading disability. Evidence for poor visual processing as an independent source of reading disability could not be established.

The present study sought to obtain initial data on children's use of the clitic pronoun se in Romance (e.g., Se cayó ‘He/she fell’) and regular (e.g., Se peinó ‘He/she combed himself/herself’) reflexive constructions. A total of 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 4 years were given two structured tasks that assessed the contrastive use of se for coding these functions. In addition, spontaneous speech data were obtained on the children's use of this clitic pronoun. To establish expected adult-like performance on the Romance reflexive task, responses from 20 Spanish-speaking adults were obtained. The results suggest that there is a differential order of acquisition of the clitic se, whereby children initially contrast regular reflexive with nonreflexive clitic constructions and later contrast between Romance and non-Romance reflexive verb pairs. Possible reasons for this difference in use are presented as these relate to issues of lexical development and the language's marking of transitivity.