This study examined learning disabled children's ability to understand and use syntactic devices for marking given versus new information in discourse, a skill where syntactic and pragmatic knowledge intersect. Using a modification of Hornby's (1971) paradigm, learning disabled and nondisabled children in grades 1 through 6 selected pictures on the basis of varying sentence types, such that their choices revealed their identification of the given information in each sentence. The production of syntactic structures for marking new elements in sentences was also assessed. Multivariate analyses revealed grade and sex effects on the comprehension task, but the only effect involving group status indicated that learning disabled girls were less able to comprehend cleft sentences than the other children. On the production task, learning disabled children relied on less complex sentence types; however, their strategies for marking given versus new information were as effective as those of nondisabled children. Implications of these findings for the relations between syntactic repertoire and the ability to integrate given and new information in oral and written discourse are discussed.

The study sought evidence consistent with the hypothesis that phonological recoding of printed words is important during reading acquisition. Children at the end of their Kindergarten year were given a test of nonsense word reading (as a measure of phonological recoding skill) as well as tests of sight word reading and verbal intelligence. Two groups of 28 children were matched on sex, school attended, sight word reading, and verbal intelligence, but differed on phonological recoding skill. If phonological recoding was important in reading acquisition, the children with greater skill in this area should make greater gains in reading achievement over the following years. When reading achievement was tested at the end of Grades 1 and 2, these children were found to be significantly ahead.

In this article it is argued that, contrary to the assertions of Pfaff (1979), adjective/noun code-switches inside NP are possible. While not strictly following the placement rules of the language of the adjective as claimed by Aguirre (1976) and others, these switches do appear to be limited by conditions on placement internal to the languages involved. So long as significant contrasts in the placement of particular categories of lexical items are maintained, code-switching inside NP is possible and can result in “creations” such as NPs with postnominal English color adjectives.

The purpose of the research was to examine children's evaluative reactions to bilingual code switching during a dyadic cross-cultural encounter. Children's reactions to code switching were elicited using a segmented dialogue technique whereby they listened to and judged each of an integrated series of speech turns one at a time in their order of occurrence. The speakers were played by English and French Canadian actors and were depicted in the roles of a salesman and a customer. English and French Canadian children were subjects. It was found that the children's evaluations of the speaker's language choices were influenced by (a) situational norms associated with appropriate salesman and customer behaviours; (b) interpersonal accommodation; and (c) ingroup favouritism, but not by sociocultural status differences between French and English. Moreover, their reactions were dynamic in that they depended upon mutual language choices by both actors and the basis of their evaluations changed from the beginning to the end of the dialogue sequence. The findings are discussed with respect to results from other developmental research using simpler elicitation techniques as well as to findings from adolescent and adult respondents.

The tendency to translate from a weaker to a stronger language was investigated as a function of proficiency in the nondominant language. Three groups of native Hebrew speakers with varying degrees of proficiency in English read passages of alternating English and Hebrew sentences. Subjects identified a following recognition sentence as either “identical” to a sentence read in the passage, a “translation” of a sentence read in the passage, or “new,” and then rated their confidence. The results showed no evidence for translation processes; with respect to “identical” and “translation” pairs, none of the groups was more accurate in recognizing sentences originally presented in their dominant language. These findings, which parallel those of an earlier study in which nonfluent bilinguals were tested auditorally, reflect similar psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying nondominant language processing in speakers of different levels of proficiency. The results were related to the distinction between automatic and controlled processes involved in dominant versus nondominant language processing.

The presence and effect of adult communication behaviors that reportedly facilitate children's verbal output were examined in clinician's and mothers' interaction with seven language-impaired children using a lag sequential analysis. Two language samples were collected from each child, one each by the clinician and mother of the child. Consecutive adult and child utterances were coded to identify adults' sharing of child's focus, child utterance length, adult utterance type, topic maintenance, lexical contingency, and time between utterances. Mothers were found to use facilitative communication behaviors more often than the children. Adults' ‘facilitative’ behaviors had limited effect on children's immediate output. Implications for assessing mothers' input to language-impaired children and eliciting language samples efficiently are discussed.

Twenty reading-disabled children, ages 7 through 10, were compared with 20 nondisabled readers of the same age range according to their ability to interpret complex sentences. Using a relatively new metric, subjects were classified according to Grammar Type and the extent to which they obeyed the c-command constraint on control in interpreting sentences containing embedded complements with missing subjects. The results demonstrated that the nondisabled readers performed at higher levels of grammatical development than did the reading-impaired subjects; there was no effect for age. Implications are made regarding the structural nature of the syntactic deficit in the reading-disabled population studied.

Learning disabled children have been found to be less likely than nondisabled children to request clarification of ambiguous messages provided by adults. This study tested a strategy deficit hypothesis as one source of this conversational deficit by assessing the effects of a brief intervention which highlighted the appropriate response strategy, i.e., question-asking. Learning disabled and non-disabled children in grades four, five, and six played the listener role in a referential communication task requiring them to select referents based on messages varying in informational adequacy. Although group and grade differences replicated previous findings, the intervention condition had no effect on the children's performance on a posttest. An analysis of referent selections indicated that the inactive listeners were overrelying on the Maxim of Quantity, the Gricean principle that cooperative speakers provide informative messages. These results suggest that conversational development depends on children's increasing ability to recognize contexts in which these conversational principles do not apply.

Data are reported for response latencies to naming pictures of objects which show a systematic relationship between naming latency and two measures of item difficulty. Of primary interest was a reanalysis of full latency distributions on a picture-by-picture basis to explore the possibility that overall mean latencies could in actuality be composed of multiple independent latency populations. Results are discussed in terms of “automatic” versus “voluntary search” modes of word retrieval.

Using a random-block design, 52 profoundly retarded nonverbal children were matched on relevant variables and randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups or a no-treatment group. In Phase One, two groups were trained in either the Premack or NON-SLIP graphic systems. Children in the Premack group learned an average of 2.3 symbols; no child in the NON-SLIP group reached the symbol stage. In Phase Two, these two groups and a third group were taught manual signs from an American Sign Language lexicon. There were significant differences in IQ and language age from pre- to posttest, and children in the two groups exposed to both graphic symbols and signs learned significantly more signs than graphic symbols. Signing appears to be a demonstrably superior intervention for profoundly retarded nonverbal populations.

This study tested the hypothesis that factors that shape children’s production of their native language (L1) will also influence adults’ pronunciation of sounds in a foreign language (L2). The final stops in CVC English words produced by 12 adult native speakers each of English, Polish, Spanish, and Chinese were phonetically transcribed. The frequency with which these stops were devoiced, deleted, or fricativized was tabulated. The Spanish subjects (unlike the Chinese or Poles) showed the effect of a transfer process, producing word-final /b, d, g/as fricatives. Subjects in all three non-native groups (but not the native English subjects) resembled English-learning children in devoicing word-final /b, d, g/. Subjects whose L1 does not have word-final stops (i.e., the native speakers of Chinese and Spanish) showed another process commonly observed in English L1 acquisition: final stop deletion. A number of language background variables (e.g., age of arrival in the United States) were found not to be significantly correlated with the accuracy of final stop production. These findings suggest that, in addition to transfer processes arising from L1/L2 phonetic and phonological differences, developmental processes similar to those affecting child L1 speech production also influence adult L2 speech production.

Eight young adults with autism and autistic-like pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) and eight mentally retarded adults were matched for nonverbal IQ and given a series of standard language tests. They were then engaged in conversations into which examiners injected three types of contingent query requests for clarification (‘I watched “Dynasty” last night.’ “You watched what?”). Results of the standard language measures revealed that the PDD group was inferior in all areas except articulation. Responses to the contingent, query task showed the PDD group to be both less specific and less willing to supply information beyond that directly queried. Implications of these results for understanding the social and linguistic deficiencies in autism are discussed.

We tested 20 language-impaired children, 20 age-matched normal children, and 20 language-matched normal children. In free recall, children simply remembered as many words possible; in cued recall, the experimenter provided the category names as retrieval cues; in repeated free recall, children recalled the list three times in succession. The principal results were that (1) language-impaired children recalled fewer words than their agemates in both free and cued recall, and (2) the pattern of repeated free recall suggested that language-impaired children were less likely than their agemates to store a word when presented, and were less consistent in their retrieval of words. Our discussion concerns the roles of lexical acquisition and lexical retrieval in language-impaired children's word-finding problems.

This study investigated the influence of the communicative situation on the directives produced by retarded children and nonretarded kindergartners. The two groups were matched on nonverbal MA and on the linguistic maturity of their spontaneous speech. All children could produce the linguistic forms appropriate for the experimental task. In the experimental task, directives were elicited in role-playing situations which differed on three dimensions: addressee age, cause of the directive, and purpose of the directive. As measured by directive politeness, the retarded and nonretarded children were influenced similarly by the situational manipulations. However, they relied on different linguistic forms to convey directives. Many children had a preferred form. Within and between group differences in form preferences were observed.

This study examines the acquisition of production and perception by adult learners of English. The particular focus is voice onset time of initial /b/'s and /p/'s. The subjects are 10 nonnative speakers of English and six native speakers who provided identification responses to synthesized stimuli varying along a voice onset time continuum. Additionally, they each produced words with initial /b/'s and /p/'s. These measures were repeated at three 1-month intervals for the nonnative speakers. The results show that nonnative speaker perception differs from native speaker perception in two important ways: (1) stop consonants are perceived continuously rather than categorically and (2) nonnative speaker perception is influenced by the location of phoneme boundaries in both the native and target languages. Nonnative speaker production shows a greater amount of similarity to native speaker production, although, where deviations occur, nonnative speakers tend to overcompensate for differences between the native and target languages. Finally, methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of perception and production.

Two experiments examined factors affecting the initial phase of word learning. Four- to 11-year-olds heard new words in three presentation conditions: A conversation, a story, and paired with a definition. Overall the results indicate that children at all ages could identify the new words as “words,” were sensitive to correct usage, and could acquire a partial semantic representation from a single exposure. Older children benefited more than younger ones from explicit definitions, suggesting that metalinguistic awareness and memory strategies affect word learning. Evidence also suggests that meanings for new words are better learned if the exemplar is peripheral to previously named categories than if the word is central to a previously named category.

Katz, Healy and Shankweiler investigated poor and good readers' performance on two order recall tasks which were differentiated by the extent to which phonetic memory strategies were employed. Contrary to their predictions, they found that poor readers were significantly impaired on both tasks. They attributed this unexpected finding to the rate at which stimuli were presented. However, results of studies that have experimentally manipulated rate of stimulus presentation in order recall tasks have demonstrated the opposite results to those predicted by these authors. The results of the present study support the hypothesis that poor readers are impaired in recalling the order of rapidly presented successive events.