It gives me great pleasure to introduce this Special Issue of Applied Psycholinguistics. One might say that it was very Canadian in its conception. The period between Christmas and New Years 2004 was particularly cold in Montreal and Toronto. It was during this very cold snap that Ellen Bialystok, Fred Genesee, and I decided to apply to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for special funding to host a conference on bilingualism. To make matters worse, one of our universities only heated its offices to the bare minimum during the holidays, and Ellen Bialystok's furnace broke down. With cold fingers, time running short, and the holiday period in full swing, we nevertheless managed to contact a dozen leading researchers from several countries who consented to become main speakers at the conference, Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a Multilingual Society, held in Toronto in May 2006 (a much warmer event). These researchers were joined by more than 300 people from 34 countries around the world, 119 of whom presented posters of their research (chosen from 250 submissions). The eager response of our research and practitioner communities for the conference and the compelling importance of the policy, educational, and program implications of bilingualism in a global context convinced me, as Editor of the Journal, that we should share the interest of the conference with you, the readers of Applied Psycholinguistics. This Special Issue contains articles by a number of the conference's speakers, and it was jointly edited by Ellen Bialystok and me with the help of Fred Genesee.

It is now 5 years since we took over the Editorship of Applied Psycholinguistics. In that time, we have endeavored to refocus the journal toward empirical work in psychology and linguistics across languages and learners. We introduced a new subtitle for the journal to this effect, and we have produced Special Issues reflecting current “hot topics” in the field, for example, the role of genetics in developmental language disorders (January 2005), grammatical processing in language learners (January 2006), nonword repetition and word learning (October 2006), and the upcoming Special Issue on language acquisition and bilingualism, reflecting on the consequences for a multilingual society. We have been delighted to see that the impact factor of the journal is now at 1.37 and that the number of submissions based on cross-language comparisons continues to increase. We welcome this trend, as in our view a cross-language approach to studying the psychological processes involved in language is particularly likely to discover fundamental processes, developments, and impairments.

The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigated: could native speakers of a nontone language learn the use of pitch patterns for lexical identification, and what effect did more basic auditory ability have on learning success. We found that all subjects improved to a certain degree, although large individual differences were observed. Learning success was found to be associated with the learners' ability to perceive pitch patterns in a nonlexical context and their previous musical experience. These results suggest the importance of a phonetic–phonological–lexical continuity in adult nonnative word learning, including phonological awareness and general auditory ability.

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish–English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of “profile effects,” where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the “distributed characteristic” of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of short-term memory such as serial recall. The present study compared serial recall of lists of monosyllabic nonwords and repetition of matched phonological forms presented as a multisyllabic nonword in typically developing school-age children. Results revealed that whereas both serial recall and nonword repetition responses showed classic short-term memory characteristics such as a serial position curve and decreasing accuracy with increasing sequence length, nonword repetition was associated with more accurate repetition overall and errors that were more closely matched to the target. Consonants benefited from nonword repetition to a greater extent than vowels. These findings indicate that factors in addition to short-term memory support retention in nonword repetition. It is suggested that coarticulatory and prosodic cues may play important roles in the recall of multisyllabic phonological forms.

This study examined how three different sources of stimulus variability—overall amplitude, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate—affect second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Native English speakers learned Spanish words in presentation formats with no variability, moderate variability, and high variability. Dependent measures were accuracy and latency of picture-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English recall. The findings indicated that variability sources that do not affect first language (L1) word identification (amplitude, fundamental frequency) do not affect L2 vocabulary learning. Conversely, variability in speaking rate, which negatively affects L1 word identification, positively affected L2 vocabulary learning. These findings are consistent with an integrated account in which sources of variability that affect phonetically relevant properties of speech impede L1 speech processing but improve L2 vocabulary learning.

Language is the key interface between our social and cognitive worlds. As a social tool, it is the means by which human interactions occur, social position is determined, and educational opportunities are defined; as a cognitive instrument, it provides access to concepts and meanings, the logical system for problem solving, and creates the organizational basis for knowledge. It is not an accident that a significant portion of all developmental research is addressed to issues of language acquisition and language performance, that the primary focus of school curricula in the early years is on the language arts, and that an ongoing concern of parents is their children's language acquisition. Language has consequence. However, language acquisition occurs in a context, and differing environments are bound to influence the way language is learned and used by young children. Children growing up in bilingual environments will have different experiences than those who encounter only one language, and these differences may have a profound impact on children's social, cognitive, and linguistic development. Understanding how these linguistic environments affect children's development requires an examination of the interactions between the social and cognitive dimensions of development in different learning environments.

A total of 1,018 signs in one deaf child's naturalistic interaction with her deaf mother, between the ages of 19 and 24 months were analyzed. This study summarizes regular modification processes in the phonology of the child sign's handshape, location, movement, and prosody. First, changes to signs were explained by the notion of phonological markedness. Second, the child managed her production of first signs through two universal processes: structural change and substitution. Constraints unique to the visual modality also caused sign language-specific acquisition patterns, namely, more errors for handshape articulation in locations in peripheral vision, a high frequency of whole sign repetitions and feature group rather than one-to-one phoneme substitutions as in spoken language development.

This study examined second language (L2) experience effects on children's acquisition of fluency-(speech rate, frequency, and duration of pausing) and prosody-based (stress timing, peak alignment) suprasegmentals. Twenty Korean children (age of arrival in the United States = 7–11 years, length of US residence = 1 vs. 11 years) and 20 age-matched English monolinguals produced six English sentences in a sentence repetition task. Acoustic analyses and listener judgments were used to determine how accurately the suprasegmentals were produced and to what extent they contributed to foreign accent. Results indicated that the children with 11 years of US residence, unlike those with 1 year of US residence, produced all but one (speech rate) suprasegmentals natively. Overall, findings revealed similarities between L2 segmental and suprasegmental learning.

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N=256) phoneme isolation: phoneme's linguistic affiliation (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars differed with respect to whether they included four critical Standard Arabic phonemes. Using a repeated-measure design, we tested children's phonemic sensitivity toward these four phonemes versus other phonemes. The results showed that the linguistic affiliation of the phoneme was reliable in explaining phoneme isolation reaffirming, hence the external validity of the linguistic affiliation constraint in explaining phoneme awareness in diglossic Arabic. The results also showed that initial phonemes and initial singleton phonemes were particularly difficult for children to isolate. These findings were discussed in light of a stipulated unique phonological and orthographic cohesion of the consonant–vowel unit in Arabic.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllable is a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered to children in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate that the phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabic affixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependent on developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the language and its orthography.

A number of studies have shown that approximately one-quarter of children in potentially bilingual environments do not become bilingual. This article explores several key factors that influence the likelihood that a child who has access to interactions in two languages will learn them both. The five factors discussed are input, language status, access to literacy, family language use, and community support, including schooling. It is argued that the quantity of input has the greatest effect on whether a minority language will be learned, but language status and attitudes about language also play a role. When families are proactive and provide daily activities for children in the minority language, the children respond by learning it. In addition, dual-immersion, “two-way” schooling is shown to benefit children's level of language proficiency in the minority language without diminishing their progress in the community language.

This study examined the reading accuracy of dyslexic readers in comparison to chronological age-matched normally progressing readers in Hindi and English using word reading tasks, matched for spoken frequency of usage, age of acquisition, imageability, and word length. Both groups showed significantly greater reading accuracy in Hindi than in English. For normally progressing readers, spoken frequency of usage had no significant effect in Hindi and a significant effect in English, whereas for dyslexic readers it had a significant effect in both languages. In Hindi, normally progressing readers produced only nonword errors; dyslexic readers produced a far greater percentage of nonword than word errors. In English, normally progressing readers produced greater percentage of word than nonword errors, whereas dyslexic readers produced greater percentage of nonword than word errors. Results are discussed in terms of orthographic transparency, sublexical, and lexical reading strategies.

Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the representation of verb argument structure in the bilingual mental lexicon and the contribution of constituent order and thematic role information in these representations. In three production tasks, Greek (L1) advanced learners of English (L2) generated an L1 prime structure (Experiment 1: prepositional object [PO] and double object [DO] structures; Experiment 2: PO, DO, and intransitive structures; Experiment 3: PO, DO, locative, and “provide (someone) with (something)” structures) before completing an L2 target structure (PO or DO only). Experiment 1 showed L1-to-L2 syntactic priming; participants tended to reuse L1 structure when producing L2 utterances. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this tendency was contingent on the combination of both syntactic structure and thematic roles up to the first postverbal argument. Based on these findings, we outline a model of shared representations of syntactic and thematic information for L1 and L2 verbs in the bilingual lexicon.

Two experiments tested the activation of gender stereotypes for Italian role nouns (e.g., teacher). The experimental paradigm was modeled on the one proposed by a study by Banaji and Hardin: participants were shown a prime word followed by a target pronoun (he or she) on which they performed a gender decision task. The prime words were Italian role nouns that had an associated female stereotype, an associated male stereotype, or no associated stereotype (control condition). The results of Experiment 1 showed no influence of stereotypes on the gender decision response to personal pronouns. However, when, in Experiment 2, the prime-target interval and the prime presentation times were prolonged, a stereotypical gender priming effect did emerge. A different inhibition pattern was found when the pronoun was preceded by a noun associated with a male stereotype instead of a female one.

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home language use of a family consisting of at least one parent and one child between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. The results show that the children in these families all spoke the majority language, but that minority language use was not universal. Differences in parental language input patterns used at home correlated with differences in child minority language use. Home input patterns where both parents used the minority language and where at most one parent spoke the majority language had a high chance of success. The “one parent–one language” strategy did not provide a necessary nor sufficient input condition. Implications for bilingual families are discussed.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relations between early bilingualism and phonological awareness in a sample of 75 Turkish–Dutch bilingual kindergarten children living in The Netherlands. In a longitudinal design, the children's first (L1) and second (L2) language abilities were measured at the beginning and end of kindergarten. At the end of kindergarten, the children's metalinguistic skills within the domain of phonological awareness were also assessed. Linear structural equation modeling was used to examine the types of intralingual (language-specific) and interlingual (language-transfer) processes over time. In addition, just how the patterns of bilingual development related to the children's later phonological awareness was examined. Turkish was found to be the dominant language on both measurement occasions. In addition to the expected longitudinal relations, there was evidence for transfer from L1 to L2. Two interrelated phonological factors emerged: phonotactic awareness and phonemic awareness. Variation in the two types of children's phonological awareness was predicted by both L1 and L2 abilities.

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety of films. Frequency measures based on this corpus compared well to other spoken and written frequency measures, and explained variance in lexical decision times in addition to what is accounted for by the available French written frequency measures.

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups of second language (L2) learners of different proficiency levels and a few agrammatics expected to show a similar pattern. Each participant is asked to comprehend 15 sentences containing SRs and ORs via a picture selection task. The results indicate that comprehension of SRs is easier than that of ORs for intermediate level L2 learners, whereas there is no significant difference between the types of relative clauses for early learners. Another result is that early learners produce errors similar to those of agrammatics, which are explained through trace deletion and referential strategy. These findings on Turkish provide significant support for the SDH.

This study examines a salient intrasyllabic phonological unit in Korean, the body-coda unit, its role in literacy skills in Korean, and a possible source of the salience of body-coda units in the spoken language. Data were collected from Korean-speaking, monolingual beginning readers (41 kindergarteners, 40 first graders). The results indicate that body-coda boundary (e.g., ca-t) is more salient than onset–rime boundary (e.g., c-at) for Korean children and show that children's body-coda awareness is an important predictor of word decoding and spelling in Korean. Furthermore, the analysis of phonological neighbors and frequency of syllable types suggests that a phonotactic feature in Korean, the frequency of consonant–verb syllable type, may be a possible source of the saliency of the body-coda intrasyllabic division for Korean children.