The logographic stage assumption in recent models of reading acquisition was examined by studying how German-speaking first graders read and spelled familiar words and matched pseudowords. Reading acquisition by German-speaking children provides an interesting case because the German writing system, in contrast to the English one, is phonologically rather transparent. To further test whether the transition from the logographic to the alphabetic stage poses a major obstacle at the beginning of reading, normally progressing first graders were contrasted with children who experienced serious difficulties at the beginning of reading and writing. In contrast to studies with American and British first graders, it was found that both normally progressing and delayed children relied on alphabetic strategies for both reading and writing, (a) Most children were able to read and - to a lesser extent - to spell completely unfamiliar pseudowords. (b) Reading of pseudowords correlated highly with reading of familiar words, and the same correlation was observed in the case of spelling, (c) Reading errors consisted mainly of nonwords beginning with the first letter(s) of the target, and most spelling errors consisted of spellings that were at least partially phonologically correct, (d) Reading performance was influenced by word exposure time, (e) Both reading performance and spelling performance were strongly predicted by knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. These findings support the conclusion that a logographic strategy is of limited importance when the writing system is phonologically rather transparent and when the instructional approach does not withhold information about grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

It has been shown that there is a strong relation between children's phonological skills and the progress that they make in reading. But there is some uncertainty whether this is a specific connection or whether it is just a byproduct of variations in general language ability. We report evidence from a longitudinal study showing that the relation between children's sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration and their success in reading is highly specific and cannot be accounted for in terms of general language ability. In this study measures were taken of a group of children's linguistic and metalinguistic skills when they were 3 and 4 years old. The linguistic measures were of the children's vocabulary, their receptive and expressive use of grammar, and their ability to imitate sentences. The metalinguistic measures were of their ability to detect rhyme and alliteration and of their awareness of syntax. Two to three years later, when the children were 6;7, we measured their progress in reading and spelling. The children's rhyme and alliteration scores were related to their reading two years later even after controls for differences in linguistic skills and also for differences in intelligence and in social background. The other metalinguistic task – syntax awareness – did not predict reading after these controls. Awareness of rhyme, we argue, makes a distinctive contribution to reading by helping children to form spelling categories.

Although many studies of slips of the tongue have been conducted with adults, very few investigations have considered children's slips of the tongue. One reason for this is the difficulty in being able to obtain children's spontaneous slips. The present study, therefore, involved the development of a new technique for eliciting slips of the tongue from children by having them repeat short “tongue-twister” phrases. Transcriptions of the subjects' productions were made from tape recordings, and errors that they produced were examined. Durations of various segments were also measured acoustically and analyzed.

A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.

A set of procedures called referential mapping has been used to assign meaning to spontaneous vocalizations of an African Grey parrot. These spontaneous vocalizations were combinations and phonological variations of specific vocal English labels that the bird had previously acquired in a study on interspecies communication. These recombinations were not necessarily intentionally used to describe or request novel objects or circumstances, even though our earlier data demonstrated that the bird could use vocalizations referentially and intentionally to identify, request, refuse, and categorize various objects. The procedures for dealing with this bird's spontaneous modifications neither attempted to nor needed to evaluate the intentionality of his behavior. Rather, the procedures instructed his trainers to respond to the novel speech acts as though he were intentionally commenting about or requesting objects, actions, or information. The success of such procedures in attaching functional significance to his spontaneous vocalizations and in encouraging subsequent innovation suggests that the technique might be applicable to intervention programs for humans with specific communicative deficits.

Three experiments explored the usefulness of a visual preference technique for assessing word comprehension in infants. Pairs of slides were presented, and visual fixation to each recorded. The parent (in Experiments 1 and 2) or the experimenter (in Experiment 3) then prompted the child with the name of one of the slides (“Find the ——,” “Do you see the ——?”), and visual fixation to each was recorded again. Percentage fixation to the picture matching the word referent following the prompt question was compared to initial preference for that picture, providing a measure of the acceptability of the picture as a word referent, independent of its initial salience.

The first experiment demonstrated increases in comprehension from 8–14 and 14–20 months. The second experiment established longitudinal stability of comprehension from 14 to 20 months. Word comprehension scores were related to parent report of vocabulary knowledge and difficulty of words. The final experiment measured 1-week test-retest reliability of the word comprehension score at 14 and 20 months and replicated the effect of word difficulty. Methodological and theoretical implications of these results are discussed, in particular, the profound effect of stimulus salience and the lack of sex differences in word comprehension.

An unusual facet of American Sign Language (ASL) is its use of grammaticized facial expression. In this study, we examine the acquisition of conditional sentences in ASL by 14 deaf children (ages 3;3–8;4) of deaf parents. Conditional sentences were chosen because they entail the use of both manual signs and grammaticized non-manual facial expressions. The results indicate that the children first acquire manual conditional signs, e.g., SUPPOSE, before they use the obligatory grammaticized conditional facial expression. Moreover, the children acquire the constellation of obligatory non-manual behaviors component by component, rather than holistically.

It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.

Language-impaired children have been shown to exhibit a variety of post-sentence comprehension deficits. Comprehension, however, may also be assessed as it develops rather than after it has occurred. The present investigation compared the real-time language processing abilities of language-impaired and normal children using a word recognition reaction time paradigm. Children's reaction times across three word positions in three sentence type conditions were measured. Results showed that the language-impaired children used linguistic context to facilitate word recognition, but were slower to do so than their normally developing peers. The results were interpreted to suggest that language-impaired children are less proficient than normal children at using their linguistic knowledge to develop linguistic representations of sentence meaning. An on-line retrieval deficit or deficient connections among processing units (e.g., Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986a, 1986b; Waltz & Pollack, 1985) are suggested as likely sources of the language-impaired children's language processing difficulties.

There is wide agreement that current psycholinguistic techniques (especially discourse analysis) may help us better understand the relationship between psychopathology and linguistic performance. This application would seem particularly worthwhile in the domain of schizophrenic speech, which has resisted adequate characterization in terms of earlier linguistic paradigms. A major effort at systematic psycholinguistic analysis has been made and is most developed in Rochester and Martin's (1979) monograph, Crazy Talk. While we see their interest in utilizing discourse analysis to be very appropriate, it manifests some serious shortcomings. Accordingly, we attempt to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it. This elucidation should provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations.

This article describes a follow-up of 25 boys diagnosed as having specific expressive language delay (SELD) in the 24- to 31-month age period. At the time of diagnosis, all subjects had Bayley MDI scores above 85, Reynell Receptive Language Age scores within 4 months of their chronological age, and Reynell Expressive Language Age scores at least 5 months below chronological age; most had vocabularies of fewer than 50 words and few if any word combinations. At follow-up, 16 boys were 3 years old, 7 were 3½, and 2 were 4 years of age. When seen for follow-up, half the 25 boys still had very poor expressive language. These boys were speaking at best in short, telegraphic sentences, and many had moderately severe articulation disorders with quite poor intelligibility. The 12 boys with better outcome had a range of language skills. All spoke in sentences to some extent, and each displayed some mastery of early morphemes (prepositions, plurals, articles, progressive tense, and possessives). However, few if any of the children spoke in completely fluent, syntactically complex, and morphologically correct language. Problems with copula and auxiliary verbs, with past tense inflections, and with pronouns seemed especially common. This research suggests that children with SELD at 24 to 30 months are at considerable risk for continuing language problems.

Environmentally contaminated speech errors occur when material derived from the speaker's environment but irrelevant to the speaker's intended utterance is erroneously incorporated into speech. Such material may include the names of objects at which speakers are looking, words that speakers are concurrently reading, segments of speech that speakers overhear, or properties of objects in the environment. It was found that although environmental contaminations display less phonological facilitation than other speech error types, they display some semantic facilitation. If the target item and interfering item are from the same syntactic category, a word substitution is more likely to result than a word blend, whereas if the items are from different categories, a blend is more likely. It is hypothesized that environmental contamination occurs at a high level of processing, but with a relatively late insertion point.

One current definition of language delay, on the basis of the Cognitive Hypothesis model, assumes that children who have similar levels of language and cognitive development are unlikely to gain from specific language intervention. Children who have cognitive skills developed to a greater degree than their language skills, in contrast, are identified as appropriate candidates for specific language facilitation. In order to examine this premise, the present study compares the effects of language intervention over a 1-year period for two groups of young children with delayed language: one group with cognitive skills markedly above their language level, and the other group with similar delays in cognitive and language skills. Eighteen subjects (13 boys, 5 girls, mean age 4;11) had cognitive skills developed above their language level, and 32 subjects (20 boys, 12 girls, mean age 5;3) had similar delays in language and cognition. Evaluation measures were Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R), MLU, Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, and Basic Language Concepts Test (BLCT). Of the four measures, only the BLCT resulted in significant gain differences favoring the students with higher cognitive than language skills. PPVT-R standard scores indicated that both groups made gains at a faster rate during intervention than prior to intervention. Clinical implications of the results are discussed.

The relatively unexamined question of what kinds of narratives are memorable as whole units of discourse was addressed by studying memory for 288 children's personal narratives. Each narrative was assigned a structural category in story grammar analysis and Labov's highpoint analysis. Narratives were also rated for the presence or absence of sensational content. An incidental free recall of these narratives was then requested from 116 subjects. As predicted, an analysis of variance of recall frequencies revealed a main effect of sensational content; sensational narratives were recalled more frequently than nonsensational ones. Although there was no main effect of highpoint structure, that variable did interact with sensational content; in the absence of sensational content, highpoint structural sophistication predicted enhanced recall. Contrary to prediction, there were no main effects of highpoint structure or story grammar. The study is interpreted as providing partial validation of highpoint analysis, as well as revealing the independent, dominant contribution of content to memory for others' narratives as whole units.

This study examined the effect of a manual interference task on deaf and hearing college students' written free recall under both immediate- and delayed-recall conditions. The stimuli consisted of printed English words that varied on signability (i.e., words that could be expressed by a single sign) and visual imagery. The manual interference task had a small adverse effect on the deaf students' recall, but this effect did not appear to be related to the use of a kinesthetic sign-based coding strategy. It was also found than the deaf subjects' reading levels were very strongly related to their level of word recall; the better deaf readers recalled more than 50% more words than the poorer readers. Ratings of the deaf subjects' speech intelligibility, however, were not related to their level of word recall.

The focus of this study is the cognitive/conceptual basis for the emergence of verbs in early lexical development. Twenty-four 12–19-month-old children were studied through (a) observation and maternal report of their acquisition of verbs in comprehension and production and (b) observation of nonverbal behavior reflected in play. There is substantive growth in the comprehension of verbs during this period, with a rapid increase between 14–16 months in the total number of verbs and decontextualized verbs comprehended, but no similar surge in production. Children's ability to consider others in the role of actor during play with objects was linked to the comprehension of verbs during this period; also, the ability to engage in symbolic action sequences on objects in play correlated with the decontextualized comprehension of verbs. These results suggest that underlying cognitive development in event representation may be related to the increased comprehension of verbs across contexts.

This study examined the manner in which 10 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and their linguistically normal chronological age (CA) and language age (LA) matched peers repaired overlapping speech. Conversational samples were elicited by an adult examiner from each subject. Instances of overlapping speech were analyzed as being either sentence initial or sentence internal (Gallagher & Craig, 1982). Both types of overlaps were then examined to determine if they required repair, and if so, how they were repaired. It was found that the proportional occurrence of both types of overlap was relatively similar across all three groups. Further, the frequency and nature of repair following sentence initial overlaps was similar across all three groups. However, SLI subjects produced a significantly greater number of unrepaired sentence internal overlaps than did either their CA or LA matched peers.

This study examined the influence of reading experience on the development of component spelling skills. Three groups of sixth-grade children were identified – good readers-good spellers (Good), good readers-poor spellers (Mixed), and poor readers-poor spellers (Poor). The children completed three different spelling tasks that assessed component spelling skills involving the use and knowledge of sound-spelling, orthographic, morphological, and visual information. Good subjects performed consistently better than Mixed and Poor subjects. Mixed and Poor subjects did not differ on measures requiring use and knowledge of sound-spelling, orthographic, and visual information. Mixed subjects performed better than Poor subjects on measures assessing use and knowledge of morphological information. It is suggested that, as a result of their greater experience with print, Mixed subjects have better knowledge of some of the linguistic, but not the visual, characteristics of words.

This article examines the perception of four English vowels (/i, i, ε, æ/) by adult native speakers of German. From the standpoint of German, it appears that English /i, i,ε/ are perceptually similar, if not identical, to German /i, i, ε,/ whereas /ε/ is a “new” vowel for German learners of English. The role of foreign language experience in the perception of second language vowels was examined through labeling responses to members of synthetic continua (beat-bit, bet-bat) in which vowel duration and spectrum were varied factorily. The subjects were relatively experienced and inexperienced second language (L2) learners and a monolingual English control group. The results suggest that L2 experience did not affect perception for the continuum with the two “similar” vowels /i/ and /I/. However, for the continuum involving the “new” vowel /æ/, the experienced Germans more closely resembled the native English speakers than the inexperienced Germans. The predominant use of duration cues in differentiating the English /ε/–/æ/ contrast by the inexperienced Germans suggested that when spectral cues are insufficient to differentiate an L2 vowel contrast, duration will be used.

Children in the preschool years develop a linguistic repertoire of narrative skills as they adapt their ways of representing events to different occasions of language use. The present study examines the abilities of primary school children to draw upon their repertoire of narrative skills in the service of language tasks. Children in grades K-2 were shown a shortened version of the silent film, The Red Balloon, and were asked to perform three narrative tasks: (a) produce an on-line narration of a 3-minute segment from the film, (b) recount the film's events as a news report, and (c) recount the film's events as an embellished story. The narrative texts produced for each task were subjected to analyses of linguistic markers of genre differences. The findings revealed very subtle distinctions between the narrative texts produced for the three genre tasks, leading to the conclusion that primary grade children have only nascent ability to apply their genre knowledge to school language tasks.