The study of language acquisition has enjoyed a robust history in recent years, with the advent of developmental psycholinguistics as a separate field, and with much attention to bilingualism and the acquisition of second languages by both children and adults. The loss of language skills by individual speakers has, by contrast, been a little researched area, with the exception of the field of aphasiology, which has developed roughly parallel with modern psycholinguistics. Typical situations in which language skills may be lost occur when an individual speaker of a language moves to an area where another language is dominant; when an ethnolinguistic minority child enters school and adopts the societal language; when a second language is no longer studied or needed; when a local language drops out of use and its speakers must adopt a more dominant language. As they grow older, young children appear to lose some language-related skills, such as the ability to make fine phonetic discriminations (see Burnham, this issue) and aging adults lose some language skills they once had.

In this study, the development of first language (L1) skills among native English-speaking students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canadian schools is explored. It is hypothesized that the early bilingual schooling received by those majority children will serve to enhance their performance on various kinds of L1 tasks. Some preliminary evidence consistent with this hypothesis is found in a longitudinal comparison of English language test scores obtained over a six-year period by 22 immersion students and 22 regular English program students. Analysis of specific test items where the immersion students clearly outperform their regular program counterparts leads to the development of more specific hypotheses, which are tested via new measures on a larger sample of students in grade 6.

This study examined the imitation, comprehension, and production of twelve morphological features by groups of deaf subjects who were instructed through manually coded English. Their performances were compared with those of hearing subjects and also with their own follow-up scores from three years later. Results showed early deficits in the English skills of deaf subjects but steady improvement of scores on all tasks over time. Initially, subjects’ age predicted only imitation performance while time in an MCE program predicted production performance in addition to imitation. But neither age nor time in program was a significant predictor of any performance at the time of follow-up. Implications for intervention with manual English codes are discussed.

Earlier studies demonstrating the discourse function of imitation have been inconclusive for methodological reasons. In the present study three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs are analysed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Examination of the types of modification introduced by the children revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies. As development progressed, questions were imitated significantly more often than nonquestions. The children's selection from multiword utterances showed convergence on a language specific discourse rule. Imitation served (i)lexical learning, (ii) the phonological approximation of adult word forms, and (iii)grammatical learning, in this temporal order. The high rate of grammatically and lexically progressive items in the earliest sample was attributed to nonselective echolalia, supposedly a genetically earlier form of imitation.

Young infants perceive a variety of speech contrasts, even those that are not relevant in their own language environment. Evidence regarding the loss of perceptual ability with phonologically irrelevant contrasts is reviewed and a theoretical distinction is advanced. It is proposed that the perception of “fragile” contrasts is lost in infancy due to lack of exposure to particular sounds, while the perception of “robust” contrasts is lost around the onset of formal language training due to lack of experience with phonologically irrelevant contrasts. This distinction should provide a heuristic framework for future research on the development of speech perception.

Communicative behaviors used in encoding new information were examined. Eighteen learning disabled/language impaired (LD/LI) children were compared with two matched groups of normally developing children: age-mates and language-mates. Behaviors studied included measures of communicative effectiveness, communicative efficiency, verbal output, and referential strategies. LD/LI children did not differ significantly from age-mates. However, they did significantly outperform language-mates. Deficient lexicon and deficient comparison activity hypotheses are discussed in light of the results.

Taking as a point of departure Locke's biological model for the origins of phonological development, this study encompasses analyses of phonetic tendencies, consonant use in babbling and early words, and phonological word-selection patterns. Data from 10 children aged 9 to 16 months are drawn from four lexically defined points covering the period from no word use to a cumulative vocabulary of 50 words. Individual differences are found to prevail from the start in all three domains analyzed, with some increase in uniformity across subjects with increasing knowledge of language. Furthermore, the phonological processes typical of development from age 1 to 3 or 4 years are found to be rooted in the phonetic tendencies of the prelinguistic period.

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that variables such as word frequency, which are known to affect semantic memory, would have more influence on how quickly words were translated from English to French, or vice versa, than would variables such as imagery, which are known to affect episodic memory.

Students whose second language was French were presented with 145 words, with instructions that they translate them into French. Measures of accuracy and reaction time were taken. French-English translation of the same words was also investigated. Seventeen other characteristics of these words were also known from previous surveys. The results of a multiple regression analysis and a factor analysis indicated that translation efficiency was most strongly influenced by the frequency of the word in the language, its familiarity, and the similarity of the French equivalent to the English word. Variables such as emotionality and imagery, known to influence retrieval in episodic memory paradigms, had little influence on translation time.

It is hypothesized that strategies and techniques employed by “expert” language learners differ from those of “novice” learners. In this study, the performance of multilingual subjects was contrasted to that of bilingual and monolingual subjects on two tasks that involved learning a miniature linguistic system. Under “implicit” learning conditions, multilingual subjects showed superior performance to that of the other two groups, but under “explicit” conditions, there were no differences. The results were interpreted in information processing terms as indicating that multilingual subjects have strategies that help them allocate processing resources more efficiently than our other subjects in formulating informal rules of limited scope under implicit conditions.

In the present paper a linguistic description is given of the process of first language acquisition of Turkish children aged 4 to 8 in a Dutch submersion environment in the Netherlands. On the basis of the assumption that language development involves the acquisition of distinct subskills in differential patternings, the development of lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic abilities have been investigated separately. Furthermore, these longitudinal data are compared with cross-sectional language data of five- and seven-year-old children in Turkey. This comparison was made in order to be able to interpret whether the Turkish language skills of native Turkish-speaking children in the Netherlands were showing delay, stagnation, or attrition of skills. The overall results suggest that in the age range of 4 to 8 years the acquisition of first language skills by Turkish children in the Netherlands can best be characterized as stagnated.

This research was designed to explore whether maintenance of the ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions requires specific linguistic/perceptual experience, or whether broadened but nonrelevant linguistic experience can result in generalized perceptual flexibility. To explore this question, bilingual and trilingual adult subjects were compared to monolingual English adults on their ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions that are not used in (any of) their native language(s). Results suggest that broadened, nonspecific linguistic experience does not contribute to increased perceptual flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to report a clinically induced phonemic split (i.e., the restructuring of allophones as distinct phonemes) by presenting longitudinal data from a functionally misarticulating child. For this child, three qualitatively and quantitatively distinct stages were observed relative to the acquisition of the phonemic split: 1. complementary distribution (allophones of the same phoneme); 2. position-specific free variation (intermediate to a phonemic split); and 3. phonemic distinction for some, but not all morphemes (phonemic split).

The results of this clinical case study, documenting the nature and development of a phonemic split, have implications for related phenomena in normal language acquisition, second-language learning, and sound change in primary languages.

Two prerecorded productions of the “What's this?” question were presented to Grade 2, 4, and 6 children and to adults over a series of trials in a referential communication task. One production contained emphatic stress on the word “this” and the other production contained equal stress on both words. For each question presentation the experimenter selected a colored picture of an object from a deck that was the match to one of two picture choices in view of the subjects. The students guessed on successive presentations whether a different picture (new topic collaboration) or the same picture (old topic collaboration) had been selected based on the presence or absence of emphatic stress in the questions. No feedback was given to the students throughout the experimental procedure. Use of intonation as a marker for topic collaboration appeared by Grade 4, which is in support of other similar research.

Relative proficiency in Gaelic varies by age in a Highland Scottish region where Gaelic is spoken by a decreasing number of bilinguals in a steadily aging population segment. Although there is a Gaelic proficiency continuum ranging from full fluency (and Gaelic dominance) to minimal generative skills (and English dominance), there are also deviations at both extremes of skill: Fully fluent speakers show self-conscious difficulty with one morphological and four syntactic structures, while minimally proficient speakers show less difficulty than might be expected in the use of conjunctions. An exceptionally keen though low-proficiency speaker can devise unusual means of compensation in using the language. Neither full fluency nor marked deficiency produces altogether predictable levels of structural conservatism or communicative success.

The well-constructed study by Seidenberg, Bruck, Fornarolo, and Backman (Applied Psycholinguistics, 6(2)) is an example of the difficulties that occur when good hypotheses and elegant designs are at variance with the realities of developmental reading disorders. My goal in this essay is to use the Seidenberg et al. study as a kind of informal assessment – both of progress in our approaches to dyslexia and of the significant issues that remain, particularly the impact of varied assumptions about homogeneity in severely impaired readers.

Elderly adults (70 to 89 years) and young adults (30 to 49 years) were asked to imitate complex sentences involving embedded gerunds, wh-clauses, that-clauses, and relative clauses. The young adults were able to imitate accurately or correctly paraphrase the sentences regardless of the length, position, or type of embedded clause. The elderly adults could accurately imitate or paraphrase short constructions. The elderly adults were unable to imitate or paraphrase correctly long constructions, especially those in which the embedded clause was sentence-initial. The pattern of results demonstrates an age-related decline in syntactic processing abilities due, perhaps, to the increased processing demands of the long or sentence-initial constructions.