Phonetic skills and vocabulary size were investigated in 37 toddlers (24 to 31 months) identified with specific expressive language impairment and 20 comparison toddlers matched on age, SES, and nonverbal ability. The use of consonants was highly consistent across two contexts: 20 minutes of structured testing and 5 minutes of free play. The comparison children produced almost triple the number of consonant types and five times as many consonant tokens as the late talkers. However, the most frequently present consonants were similar across groups, indicating delayed rather than deviant phonetic development in the late talkers. The late talkers used a much higher proportion of their consonants in initial position than did the normally developing toddlers. Consonant types and tokens were significantly related to reported vocabulary size on Rescorla's (1989) Language Development Survey. No significant predictive relationship was found between either phonetic repertoire or vocabulary size at intake and age 3 language outcome. However, age 3 MLU and IPSyn scores were significantly predicted by age-normed severity of expressive delay at intake (Reynell Expressive z score), with more delayed children showing poorer outcomes.

Three experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English, French, or Spanish. Nonsense words that shared both orthography and phonology at the level of the rhyme with real words (cake-dake, comic-bomic), phonology only (cake-daik, comic-bommick), or neither (faish, ricop) were created for each orthography. Experiment I compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme orthography with real words (dake) with those that did not (daik). Significant facilitation was found for shared rhymes in English, with reduced effects in French. Experiment 2 compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme phonology with real words (daik) with those that did not (faish). Significant facilitation for shared rhyme phonology was found in both languages. Experiment 3 compared English, French, and Spanish children's reading of nonsense words (dake vs. faish) and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic and phonological familiarity for each language. The size of the familiarity effect, however, was much greater in the less transparent orthographies (English and French). These results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by children who are learning to read more and less transparent orthographies.

This study investigated the development of automaticity in second language word recognition. In an earlier study (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993) we demonstrated that a reduction in the coefficient of variation of lexical decision reaction time (CVRT) - the standard deviation of reaction time divided by mean reaction time (RT) - reflects a restructuring of underlying cognitive processing mechanisms in the direction of increased automaticity and not a simple speed-up of those mechanisms. In the current study, English speakers studying French performed multiple lexical decision tasks. Differences in CVRT were compared cross-sectionally and longitudinally. As in the earlier study, crosssectional analyses showed that CVRT correlated positively with RT for initially fast, but not initially slow, responders. CVRT also correlated positively with RT in longitudinal analyses. These results confirm that, with extended learning experience, the cognitive components underlying word recognition are restructured (automatized) and not simply speeded-up.

This study examined the effects of differing degrees of bilingualism on the nonverbal problemsolving abilities of children in grade 3. Three linguistic groups were compared on problem-solving tasks designed to measure control of attention or analysis of knowledge, processes previously shown to develop differently in monolingual and bilingual children solving linguistic problems (Bialystok, 1988). In this study, an English-speaking monolingual group was compared with a French–English bilingual group and a Bengali-English bilingual group. All of the children in the study were similar except for their language background. Tests of language proficiency confirmed that the French-English subjects were balanced bilinguals and that the Bengali-English subjects were partial bilinguals. The balanced French–English bilinguals showed better performance on the non-linguistic tasks requiring control of attention than both the partial bilingual group and the monolingual group. There were no differences found between the groups on the non-linguistic task requiring analysis of representational structures. These results indicate that balanced bilinguals carry over their linguistic advantage in control of attention into the non-linguistic domain.

This study examines the effect of valency (defined as the associative value that represents the number of two-kanji words containing in first or second position the first-positional kanji of the word) on the recognition of two-kanji words in Japanese. Lexical decisions were 24 ms faster for words in the high-valency condition than in the low-valency condition, but were 26 ms slower for nonwords in the high-valency condition than in the low-valency condition. While these results suggested a significant interaction between valency and wordness, a regression analysis indicated that the frequency and valency of the first constituent kanji are significant factors for word recognition, and that the frequency of the first constituent kanji is a significant factor for nonword recognition. The secondary-frequency effect hypothesis is put forth to explain the effects of valency and other variables on lexical decision time.

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.

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 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 regard to Angela Signorini's article, “Word reading in Spanish: A comparison between skilled and less skilled beginning readers,” which appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics, 18 (pp. 319–344), Tables 2 and 4 were incorrectly set.