This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing and grade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of children produced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional word writing, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measures of grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling for general intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variables in accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills (phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental print exposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained all the variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case of reading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergarten writing appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factors underlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.

Studies on the acquisition of a third language (L3) in a bilingual context have shown that literacy in two languages facilitates the acquisition of a third (Cenoz & Valencia, 1994; Swain, Lapkin, Rowen, & Hart, 1990). The present study seeks to contribute to this line of research by comparing the acquisition of English as an L3 by Catalan/Spanish bilingual high school students in an immersion program with the acquisition of English by Spanish monolinguals. Data from 201 participants were submitted to a hierarchical multiple regression analysis, rendering results that show that bilingualism indeed has a positive effect on the acquisition of an L3. The evidence is discussed from a cognitive perspective.

Private speech (PS) – or speech for the self – was studied in preschool-age children to determine how widely and with what characteristics it occurs when examined in the familiar home setting. Activities were selected that required several steps and that were intended to engage working memory or longer term recall. Both quantitative (numbers of words and utterances produced) and qualitative (utterance type) analyses were conducted on the children's PS. Across the age range from 4 ½ to 6 years, younger children had higher frequencies of PS than older children, which fits the predictions made by Vygotsky (1958/1962, 1978). Increased information loads resulted in more PS, indicating a relation between PS and task difficulty; however, total quantities of PS were not correlated with degree of task success. Self-regulatory utterances accounted for 89% of the PS produced; the majority of these utterances involved repetitions of the instructions that appeared to enhance recall, to help pace the children's activity, or to enable deliberation with respect to making choices. There was a strong age trend in which the amount of audible PS decreased with age. Qualitative differences across tasks are presented and considered in relation to how PS functions for different activities and possibly achieves adaptive significance.

Goswami and Bryant (1990) proposed a theory of reading development based on three causal connections. One of these causal connections was based on the relationship between rhyming skills and reading development found in English. To explain this connection, they suggested that young readers of English used analogies based on rimes as one means of deciphering the alphabetic code. This proposal has recently become the subject of some debate. The most serious critique has been advanced by Seymour and his colleagues (Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1997; Seymour & Duncan, 1997; Seymour & Evans, 1994). These authors reported a series of studies with Scottish schoolchildren which, they claim, show that progression in normal reading acquisition is from a small unit (phonemic) approach in the initial stage to a large unit (rime-based) approach at a later stage. Two experiments are presented which replicate those conducted by Seymour and his group with samples of English schoolchildren. Different results are found. It is argued that methodological and instructional factors may be very important for the conceptual interpretation of studies attempting to pit “small” units (phonemes) against “large” units (onsets and rimes) in reading. In particular, it is necessary to consider whether a given phonological awareness task requires the recognition of shared phonological segments (“epilinguistic” processing) or the identification and production of shared phonological segments (metalinguistic processing). It is also important to take into account the nature of the literacy instruction being implemented in participating schools. If the phonological aspects of this tuition focus solely on phonemes (small units), then poor rime-level (large unit) performance may be found in metalinguistic tasks.

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a pair of widely used parent-report instruments for assessing communicative skills in infants and toddlers. This report describes short-form versions of the CDIs and their development, summarizes newly available normative data and psychometric properties of the instruments, and discusses research and clinical applications. The infant short form (Level I, for 8- to 18-month-olds) contains an 89-word checklist for vocabulary comprehension and production. The two parallel versions of the toddler short form (Level II, Forms A and B, for 16- to 30-month-olds) each contain a 100-word vocabulary production checklist and a question about word combinations. The forms may also be useful with developmentally delayed children beyond the specified age ranges. Copies of the short forms and the normative tables appear in the appendices.

In this study we examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). A total of 12 children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax (RS) completed three tasks. In the working memory task, children recalled as many words as possible under three processing load conditions varying in the number of mental operations (i.e., no load, single load, dual load). In the off-line comprehension task, children listened to linguistically nonredundant and redundant sentences. In the real-time sentence processing task, children monitored sentences for the occurrence of a target word appearing at the beginning, middle, or end of a test sentence and pushed a response pad as quickly as possible upon hearing the target. In the memory task, SLI children recalled fewer words in the dual-load condition relative to CA peers, who showed no condition effect. The SLI and RS groups performed similarly overall; however, both groups recalled fewer words in the dual-load condition than in the other conditions. In the off-line task, the SLI group comprehended fewer sentences of both types relative to the CA controls and fewer redundant sentences relative to themselves and to the RS controls. A significant correlation between working memory and sentence comprehension was found for the SLI group and control groups. For the on-line task, between-group analyses revealed that the SLI group yielded an overall slower word recognition reaction time than the CA and RS groups. Working memory and sentence processing were not correlated for any group. Results were interpreted to suggest that SLI children have a more limited functional working memory capacity than their CA peers. Children with SLI also appear to have greater difficulty managing their working memory resources relative to both age peers and younger children when performing a conventional off-line sentence comprehension task but not a real-time sentence processing task.

This book by Carson Schütze poses an important question. Are grammaticality judgments a reliable source of data for linguistic theories? Grammaticality judgments, reliable or not, have been the main, and most often the only, source of data in linguistic theory for many years. “‘Because many of the relevant structures are fairly complex and simply might not arise in the normal course of conversation, or during observation by an experimenter' (White, 1989, p. 58), UG [Universal Grammar] researchers have generally relied on some form of grammaticality judgment (GJ) task” (Katrien & Lantolf, 1992, p. 32). Katrien and Lantolf (1992) pointed out that with this task linguists try to draw on speakers' intuitions about their competence. Grammaticality judgments consist of questions about whether a sentence is grammatical according to native speakers. Most often, the native speaker is the linguist her- or himself as the only subject. Not only can bias exist when linguists are the source of data for her or his own theories, but also relying on the intuitions of only one speaker limits the credibility of the theory. When more than one speaker is queried, it has been shown that consistency is not always guaranteed: variation among and within speakers is a common feature in judgments (Mohan, 1977; Snow & Meijer, 1977). Idiosyncrasies of the subjects, presentation of the material, and experimenter's procedure are among the factors that contribute to this variation in judgments. An underlying problem in linguistic theorizing comes from the fact that linguists are normally not “trained in methods for getting reliable data” (p. 4). All this results in theories that are not adequately supported. Nonetheless, they are used as a springboard for new theories. Schütze provides linguists with answers to the following questions. What information about language can grammaticality judgments offer? What factors affect the form of these judgments? What can be done to make the best use of these judgments?

In the early 1990s, Lynn Cherny spent much of her time in the MUD – not mired in wet earth, but actively exploring “Multi-User Dungeons.” These “fictional universes with a focus on role-playing,” as they are defined in the Introduction, enable groups of Internet-connected individuals to assemble in cyberspace, communicating by way of sequentially typed text. Later, as a doctoral student in linguistics at Stanford, Cherny decided to study ethnographically – that is, from the perspective of one methodically and dispassionately observing a different race – the expressive practices of those habitually using this strange new modality.

Steven Pinker has written a very lengthy new book that, as the dust cover informs the reader, attempts to do for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct. What The Language Instinct did was to expand on Pinker and Bloom's (1990) thesis that language is an evolved system, an intricately designed set of mechanisms that must have been shaped by natural selection. What The Language Instinct did not do was provide a specific thesis about how language actually evolved. That Pinker did not provide a theory of actual language origins in his 1994 book is not a weakness. Indeed, Pinker's work has provided a useful rubric for subsequent linguistic theorizing (cf. Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998). It is this directional strategy that also appears to be at the heart of “how the mind works.” Critically, Pinker wants the reader to think about three main ideas (see the interview with Pinker in The Evolutionist): (1) computation; (2) evolution; and (3) specialization.