This study tested the diverging predictions of recent theories of children's learning of spelling regularities. We asked younger (Grades 1 and 2) and older (Grades 3 and 4) elementary school–aged children to choose the correct endings for words that varied in their morphological structure. We tested the impacts of semantic frequency by including three types of words ending in -er: derived and inflected forms, the first of which are far more frequent across the language, and one-morpheme control forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct ending for derived forms over one-morpheme control words. This difference emerged for inflected forms only for the older children. We also tested the impacts of orthographic frequency by contrasting performance on the two derived allomorphs -er and -or, the first of which is far more frequent, and comparison one-morpheme forms. Both younger and older children were more likely to choose the correct spelling for the derivational -er over the same letter pattern in control words. This difference did not emerge in either group for the -or ending. The implications of these findings for current models of children's spelling development are discussed.

Sheldon Rosenberg, the Founding Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics, died on October 9, 2012, in Evanston, Illinois, as a result of complications from Parkinson disease. He was 82.

English-speakers' learning of a French vowel contrast (/ə/–/ø/) was examined under six different stimulus conditions in which contrastive and noncontrastive stimulus dimensions were varied orthogonally to each other. The distribution of contrastive cues was varied across training conditions to create single prototype, variable far (from the category boundary), and variable close (to the boundary) conditions, each in a single talker or a multiple talker version. The control condition involved identification of gender appropriate grammatical elements. Pre- and posttraining measures of vowel perception and production were obtained from each participant. When assessing pre- to posttraining changes in the slope of the identification functions, statistically significant training effects were observed in the multiple voice far and multiple voice close conditions.

This study investigates whether developmental dyslexia involves an impairment in implicit phonological representations, as distinct from orthographic representations and metaphonological skills. A group of adults with dyslexia was matched with a group with no history of speech/language/literacy impairment. Tasks varied in the demands made on (implicit) phonological representations versus metalinguistic analysis/manipulation, and controlled the contribution of phonological versus orthographic representations by including both a segmental and an equivalent suprasegmental (nonorthographic) version of each task. The findings show a dissociation between metaphonological skills and implicit phonological representations, with the dyslexic group impaired in metaphonological manipulation skills in both segmental and suprasegmental tasks, but not in implicit knowledge of phonological contrasts.

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., teach) is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., teacher). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed that equal magnitudes of masked stem-target priming are obtained for both morphologically complex word primes (e.g., doloroso-DOLOR [painful-PAIN]) and morphologically complex nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the stem (e.g., dlooroso-DOLOR). Experiment 2 used morphologically complex nonword primes comprising lexically illegal combinations of stems and suffixes (e.g., total + ito [a little total]). Priming was obtained for morphologically related nonword primes (e.g., totalito-TOTAL), but not for nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the pseudostem (e.g., ttoalito-TOTAL). Our data suggest that morphoorthographic parsing mechanisms benefit from semantic constraints at early stages in the reading system, which we discuss in the context of current morphological processing accounts.

This study aimed to identify factors that contribute to bilingual children's decontextualized language production and investigate how schooling experience and bilingualism affect the development of this skill. The word definition skills of seventy Korean–English bilingual children whose first language was Korean, yet who had been schooled in English, were analyzed. The findings indicate that contrary to the results from previous studies, the participants' decontextualized language production was much better in their home language than in their school language, when considering both the formal linguistic structure and the communicative adequacy of their word definitions. In addition, limited cross-language transfer across tasks was present and cross-language contribution was observed only in the children's ability to achieve communicative adequacy, but not in their ability to construct conventional definition syntax. The results are discussed in terms of the linguistic and typological distance between the two languages and the potential effects of language-learning contexts.

Twenty-five children with specific language impairment (SLI; age 5 years, 3 months [5;3]–8;2), 50 typically developing children (3;3–8;2), and 31 normal adults participated in three eye-tracking experiments of spoken language comprehension that were designed to investigate the use of verb information during real-time sentence comprehension in Spanish. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences like El niño recorta con cuidado el papel (The boy trims carefully the paper) in the presence of four depicted objects, only one of which satisfied the semantic restrictions of the verb recorta (e.g., paper, clock, fox, and dinosaur). Eye movements revealed that children with SLI, like other groups, were able to recognize and retrieve the meaning of the verb rapidly enough to anticipate the upcoming semantically appropriate referent, prior to actually hearing the noun phrase el papel (the paper). Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that for all groups of participants, anticipatory eye movements were also modulated by the semantic fit of the object serving as the patient/theme of the verb. Relatively fine-grained semantic information of a verb was computed fast enough even by children with SLI to result in anticipatory eye movements to semantically appropriate referents. Children with SLI did differ from age-matched controls, but only slightly in terms of overall anticipatory looking at target objects; the time course of looking between these groups was quite similar. In addition, no differences were found between children with SLI and control children matched for mean length of utterance. Implications for theories that characterize SLI are discussed.

This study examined the relation between young English language learners’ (ELL) native oral language skills and their language input in transitional bilingual education kindergarten classrooms. Spanish-speaking ELLs’ (n = 101) Spanish expressive language skills were assessed using the memory for sentences and picture vocabulary subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery—Revised. Samples of transitional bilingual education teachers’ (n = 21) speech were recorded and coded for syntactic complexity and vocabulary usage. Results revealed considerable variation in ELLs’ language scores, with overall performance below the normative sample. There was also wide variation in teachers’ speech across classrooms. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that gains in ELLs’ expressive language skills were positively related to the diversity of teachers’ vocabulary and teachers’ syntactic complexity. These findings suggest that the quality of teachers’ language input, not just the quantity of their input, plays a significant role in the language learning trajectories of ELLs.

This study investigated how individual differences in linguistic knowledge and processing skills relate to individual differences in speaking fluency. Speakers of Dutch as a second language (N = 179) performed eight speaking tasks, from which several measures of fluency were derived such as measures for pausing, repairing, and speed (mean syllable duration). In addition, participants performed separate tasks, designed to gauge individuals’ second language linguistic knowledge and linguistic processing speed. The results showed that the linguistic skills were most strongly related to average syllable duration, of which 50% of individual variance was explained; in contrast, average pausing duration was only weakly related to linguistic knowledge and processing skills.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is frequently associated with learning disabilities. The present study examined the written composition of children with ADHD, which depends to a large degree on continuous self-regulation and attentional control skills for organizing information and maintaining the level of effort. Fifty children with ADHD and 50 normally developing children, matched on age and IQ, were assessed using a composition writing task. The results contribute to prior research findings by showing that the children with ADHD performed significantly worse than the comparison groups on the majority of the planning, translation, and revision process measures usually employed to assess the quality of written compositions. Deficiencies in executive functioning or poor linguistic and metalinguistic competence could account for the results found. More research is needed to clarify the underlying causes of the written composition performance profile of children with ADHD.

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading times for critical segments, results showed that different proficiency groups of Taiwanese English learners resolved such ambiguities in a way similar to native speakers to varying extents. The findings suggest that the sentence-processing mechanism of human language is subject to sufficient facility with syntactic access and/or with a network of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information of individual speakers.

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb's syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.

Often, the classification of words does not go beyond “difficult” (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or “easy” (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]–14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used cohesive devices in narratives similarly to mentally matched children, but their performance differed from the chronologically matched children only for referential cohesion. WS children's grammatical error rates were similar to both the mentally and chronologically matched children. Implications for the characterization of the language profile of individuals with WS and considerations for the focus of future narrative research are discussed.

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority learners reading in English. Multivariate path analysis was used to investigate the unique contribution of derivational morphological awareness to reading comprehension as well as its indirect contributions via three hypothesized mediators for students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade (N = 101). Results indicated a significant unique contribution of morphological awareness, controlling for phonemic decoding, listening comprehension, reading vocabulary, word reading fluency, and passage reading fluency. Results further indicated significant indirect contributions of morphological awareness via reading vocabulary and passage fluency, but not via word reading fluency. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in second-language reading comprehension.

This study examined transfer facilitation effect of first language morphological awareness on second language lexical inference ability among Grade 6 Chinese-speaking English as a foreign language learners in China. A set of paper and pencil tests was administered to measure children's morphological awareness and lexical inference ability in both Chinese and English. Results showed that the contribution of Chinese morphological awareness to English morphological awareness was larger for compound words than for derived words. In addition, the indirect effect of Chinese compound awareness on English compound word meaning inference was significant, but that of Chinese derivational awareness on English derived word meaning inference did not achieve significance. These findings confirmed that cross-linguistic transfer of Chinese morphological awareness was responsive to the linguistic distance between Chinese and English.

In the light of the literature describing oral language difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD), event-related potentials were used in order to compare morphosyntactic processing in 16 adults with DD (aged 20–28 years) and unimpaired controls. Sentences including subject–verb agreement violations were presented auditorily, with grammaticality and subject number as main factors. Electrophysiological data revealed differences between groups concerning both the latency of the P600 component and the additional presence in the DD group of a negativity broadly diffused all over the scalp. Moreover, these electrophysiological anomalies increased when plural sentences were processed. On the whole, the results support the hypothesis of a linguistic deficit and of different language processing modalities in DD participants.

The research reported in this paper investigated the effects of semantic relatedness of words (closely related vs. distantly related) and morpheme type (free morpheme vs. bound morpheme) on young Chinese children's homophone awareness, an aspect of morphological awareness, in two experiments. The first experiment was a cross-sectional study including 39 children in a beginning kindergarten class, 39 children in an intermediate kindergarten class, and 36 children in a senior kindergarten class. The second experiment was a 7-month longitudinal study involving 43 first graders and 50 second graders at the beginning of the study. In both experiments, the children judged whether orally presented words shared the same morpheme or contained homophonous morphemes. The results suggest that homophone awareness emerges in Chinese children in the kindergarten years. Children's morpheme identification is facilitated by the semantic proximity of words that share a morpheme, and awareness of free morphemes is developed before that of bound morphemes. Furthermore, although semantic relatedness is the most prominent factor in kindergarten, its effect varies as a function of morpheme type in the early primary grades. Our research sheds light on the developmental course of morphological awareness and the factors that influence it.

Following an extensive overview of the subject, this study explores the relationships between second-language (L2) explicit/implicit knowledge sources, embedded in the declarative/procedural memory systems, and L2 working memory (WM) capacity. It further examines the relationships between L2 reading comprehension and L2 WM capacity as well as those between L2 reading comprehension and L2 explicit/implicit knowledge sources. Participants were late adult learners of English as an L2, with a relatively advanced level of English proficiency. They completed tests measuring their WM capacity, explicit knowledge, implicit knowledge, and L2 reading comprehension. Correlation analysis revealed significant relationships between L2 WM capacity and both explicit and implicit L2 knowledge. Exploratory factor analysis showed that explicit knowledge, WM capacity, and L2 reading comprehension loaded on a single factor whereas implicit L2 knowledge formed an independent factor with no relationship to L2 reading. The results suggest that L2 WM is able to manipulate and store both explicit and implicit L2 input through controlled and automatic processes. They also suggest that L2 explicit knowledge, connected with the control processes of the declarative system's lexical/semantic features, and L2 WM, reflecting attentional resource capacity/allocation associated with control processes, play an important role in L2 reading comprehension.

This study investigated fast mapping in late-talking (LT) toddlers and toddlers with normal language (NL) development matched on age, nonverbal cognition, and maternal education. The fast-mapping task included novel object labels and familiar words. The LT group scored significantly lower than the NL group on novel word comprehension and production, as well as familiar word production. For both groups, fast-mapping performance was associated with concurrent language ability and later language outcomes. A post hoc analysis of phonotactic probability (PP) and neighborhood density (ND) suggested that the majority of NL toddlers displayed optimal learning of the nonword with low PP/ND. The LT group did not display the same sensitivity to PP/ND characteristics as the NL group.