This study examined the effect of word class (nouns vs. verbs) on L2 pronunciation accuracy of Korean–English bilinguals. The participants were 192 adult immigrants whose age of arrival (AOA) in the United States ranged from 6 to 23 years. Transcriptions of their productions of English sentences indicated that they were more accurate in pronouncing verbs than nouns. Similarly, the results of a grammaticality judgment test revealed that they were more accurate in detecting incorrect formulations of verbs than nouns. These effects were significant in late L2 learners (AOA 12–23). The results were interpreted to reflect the influence of the linguistic structure of Korean (where the verb is more prominent than the noun) on learning English as an L2.

Canadian children (n = 81; 9–13 years) who spoke both English and Italian were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. There was a significant relationship between English and Italian across all phonological tasks. The relationship was less evident for syntactic skills and was generally absent for working memory measures. Analyses of phonological, syntactic, and memory processes based on levels of skill in English reading showed significantly better performance by skilled readers compared to less skilled readers; this was also true for the 11- to 13-year-olds compared to the 9- to 10-year-olds. Similar results were obtained as a function of levels of skill in Italian reading. On all Italian tasks, the bilingual children lagged behind monolingual children matched on age. However, less skilled and skilled bilingual Italian children had significantly higher scores than monolingual English–Canadian children (with comparable reading skills) on English tasks involving reading, spelling, syntactic awareness, and working memory. The results suggest that English–Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing, but it may influence other linguistic modules. In addition, exposure to a language with more predictable grapheme–phoneme correspondences, such as Italian, may enhance phonological skills in English.

This article concerns second language teaching with a format-based method. The following article in this issue concerns foreign language teaching using the same approach. In the present study, the differences between a format-based teaching approach and a standard approach used as treatments in a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design are described in detail. The hypothesis tested is whether the effects of a format-based teaching method and a standard second language teaching method differ after two years for children at the age of 6. Results of MANOVA analysis for repeated measures show that the groups are quite comparable on the dependent variables, with some small differences in development between the two groups. Univariate results reveal that these differences favor children in the experimental group for sound articulation and favor children in the control group for sound discrimination. The results of the present article and those of the following article are discussed in light of broader issues concerning the differences between second language and foreign language teaching.

Many previous studies of children's spelling have adopted a narrow approach, examining one linguistic structure at a time and paying little attention to differences among children or changes with development. We broadened the focus by examining two different, but potentially related, patterns (stressed syllabic /r/ and letter-name vowels) and by tracking changes in performance from fall to spring of first grade. The results show how children move from using one letter for each phonological unit (e.g., SR for sir; KON for cone) to appreciating the function of “extra” letters (e.g., the vowel letters i of sir and e of cone). Errors such as SRE for sir may arise during this process, reflecting an overgeneralization of the silent e pattern. The results are generally consistent with the view that spelling becomes more “orthographic” with development. However, the course of development is not always as predicted by existing stage theories.

Based on the Competition Model, the present study investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-à-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). The subjects were L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese and English. The results show that both Chinese and English monolingual controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as determinants for Chinese and English sentence processing. Nevertheless, context was found to play a bigger role in Chinese than in English. As for L2 learners, the main effect of context was significant in all groups of learners of Chinese and English. However, the Chinese EFL learners relied on context to a greater extent than did the English CFL learners when processing their respective L2.

This article describes the preliminary findings in the Basque Country of a project shared by four European countries to teach a second language or a foreign language to preschool and school-age children. The method used to teach the foreign language – in this case, the third language (English) – is based on the use of dramatized formats (Taeschner, 1992). Here, we examine (1) the level of proficiency attained by the experimental groups (50 pupils) at the end of the first year and at the end of the second year of working with the method and (2) the level of proficiency attained by the experimental groups by the end of the second year compared to that attained by the control groups (20 pupils) working with a different method. Other variables are also considered: specific behavior types (disruptive, withdrawn), intelligence, sex, language achievement, and sociocultural background. The pupils were tested at the beginning of the project, at the end of the first year, and at the end of the second year. The linguistic data were transcribed and analyzed with the CLAN programs of CHILDES (MacWhinney, 1995), and various statistical analyses were carried out. The results indicate significant differences in language proficiency in favor of the experimental group as well as some interesting information about children with specific behaviors learning with this method.

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.

Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness. Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.

A total of 38 preschool children (3 and 4 years old) were assessed on a set of phonological awareness tasks three times over the course of a year. The tasks used were rhyme and alliteration matching tasks with distractor items that were either semantically or phonologically related to the target. In both tasks, the children found the distractors matched for phonological similarity more difficult to reject than the semantically related distractors or the unrelated distractors. The results emphasize the importance of controlling for global phonological factors when designing phonological awareness tasks. The longitudinal findings are discussed within the context of current theories on the development of phonological representations.

This article presents a new method that can compare lexical priming (word–word) and sentential priming (sentence–word) directly within a single paradigm. We show that it can be used to address modular theories of word comprehension, which propose that the effects of sentence context occur after lexical access has taken place. Although lexical priming and sentential priming each occur very quickly in time, there should be a brief time window in which the former is present but the latter is absent. Lexical and sentential priming of unambiguous words were evaluated together, in competing and converging combinations, using time windows designed to detect an early stage where lexical priming is observed but sentential priming is not. Related and unrelated word pairs were presented visually, in rapid succession, within auditory sentence contexts that were either compatible or incompatible with the target (the second word in each pair). In lexical decision, the additive effects of lexical priming and sentential priming were present under all temporal conditions, although the latter was always substantially larger. In cross-modal naming, sentential priming was present in all temporal conditions; lexical priming was more fragile, interacting with timing and sentential congruence. No evidence was found for a stage in which lexical priming is present but sentential priming is absent – a finding that is difficult to reconcile with two-stage models of lexical versus sentential priming. We conclude that sentential context operates very early in the process of word recognition, and that it can interact with lexical priming at the earliest time window.

Focusing on mother–child verbal interactions in two different contexts, the present study examined whether differences in maternal conversational style could be explained by children's linguistic and conversational abilities and by the mothers' expressed attitudes to collectivism. To this end, 20 Estonian mothers were videotaped with their 6-year-old children during mealtime and puzzle solving, and they were asked to fill in a questionnaire on collectivistic attitudes. The results showed that the mothers' frequency of engaging children in conversation was not related to the children's linguistic and conversational abilities. The children talked more and spoke more complexly during puzzle solving. The context had a great influence on the maternal regulatory speech. Contrary to the expectations, mothers who scored higher in collectivism were not more directive; instead, they tended to be more talkative.

The study explores the criterion-related validity of the Swedish version of the Communicative Development Inventories–Word & Sentences (SECDI-W&S). In two follow-up procedures, SECDI-W&S was used to assess vocabulary and grammar skills in 32 children at ages 1;10 or 2;4. At the first follow-up, 14 months later (at ages 3;0 or 3;6), two grammar tasks from the SECDI-W&S and one narrative task (frog story) were given to 27 children. Predictive validity ranged from .50 to .60 for most assessed skills over the 14-month period, whereas concurrent validity scores at ages 3;0 or 3;6 ranged from .48 to .70. The second follow-up at 26 months (at ages 4;0 or 4;6) was conducted with the narrative task only. Predictive validity from ages 1;10 or 2;4 for the second follow-up remained high for some of the measures; however, for other measures it diminished, which could be partly accounted for by ceiling effects. The overall results confirm that the criterion-related validity of the SECDI is sound.

Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual and bilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and association tasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and the input frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4- and 7-year-olds. These studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers with respect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency in primary education.

This study attempted to determine whether phonological decoding could be observed among severely and profoundly deaf children during reading. For this purpose, the ability of 20 deaf children to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudowords (a model item and two test items) was investigated. In the first condition, one of the test items was a homophone of the model (e.g., kise, kyse, kine). In the second condition, one of the test items had the same first syllable as the model item, as defined by its structure or by nasalization (e.g., lan.jier, lan.du, la.nud). The results demonstrated that deaf children with good speech levels, as well as hearing children matched on word reading level, were sensitive to homophony when visual proximity between the model and test items were controlled. They were also sensitive to syllabic structure when the first syllables were CV and in the nasalization condition. By contrast, deaf children with poor speech abilities did not show this pattern of results in all conditions. The possibility that the latter results could be explained by deaf children's sensitivity to orthographic frequency phenomena is discussed. A link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills is suggested, and the implications of those results for a general understanding of the reading processes of deaf children are presented.

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children's own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children's own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters.

This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered.

A sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's Competition Model was administered to L2 learners of English and Chinese at three different stages of learning. The main purposes of the research were (a) to examine how transfer patterns at the sentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and (b) to investigate whether or how transfer patterns found in Chinese EFL learners (i.e., native speakers of a semantics-based language learning a syntax-centered target language) differ from those found in English CFL learners (i.e., native speakers of a syntax-based language acquiring a semantics-centered one). The results show that transfer patterns do vary as a function of proficiency, and that Chinese EFL learners and English CFL learners display somewhat different patterns of developmental change in sentence processing transfer.

Topic choice, topic synchrony, and utterance function during mother–child play sessions at age 3 were examined in 32 late talkers (identified at 24 to 31 months) and 21 comparison children, matched at intake on age, SES, and nonverbal ability. At age 3, late talkers had significantly lower MLUs and IPSyn scores than comparison children. Late talkers and comparison children did not differ in number of utterances, topic initiation, topic synchrony, use of commands, reactions to commands, or conversational fillers. However, late talkers asked significantly fewer questions, provided fewer answers to maternal questions, made fewer declarative statements, and were less likely to elaborate on their own topic than comparison children. Mothers of late talkers produced significantly more utterances and asked many more questions, but otherwise they did not differ from mothers of comparison children. In both groups, children and mothers were highly synchronous. When late talkers were divided into two groups (children with continuing delay vs. “late bloomers” who were within the normal range in MLU), the subgroups did not differ significantly from each other on any conversational measure.

This article addresses whether phonological representation is an area of weakness for children with SLI and whether it contributes to their difficulty with grammatical morphemes. Bishop (1997) proposed that children with SLI form phonological representations more slowly than typically developing children. This hypothesis was investigated by exposing a group of children with SLI and a group of typically developing children, matched for language ability, to novel morphemes. Their ability to detect phonemic changes from the target morpheme was tested. Children with SLI were less able than typically developing children to detect changes when the morphemes were presented in nonfinal utterance positions. Hence, children with SLI were less able to form fully specified phonological representations of morphemes in conditions of low perceptual salience. The results are interpreted within a limited processing capacity framework.

This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.