Classrooms are increasingly multicultural in their social composition, and students are increasingly connected, through digital media, to local and global networks. However, pedagogy has failed to take full advantage of the opportunities these resources represent. "Multilingual Digital Storytelling" draws attention to the interfaces…

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this "Handbook," written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Two experiments using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm examined infants' ability to form and retrieve a basic-level category. Results indicated that infants categorized when tested immediately and after a five-minute delay. (PCB)

Sixteen children, aged 7:8 to 9:10, learned 2 miniature languages differing in word order. Children found the Subject-Object-Verb language easier than the Verb-Subject-Object language; they also made more suffix errors and fewer word order errors in the Subject-Object-Verb language. (Author/DB)

Two experiments examined children's semantic representations and semantic naming errors. Results suggested that functional and physical properties are core aspects of object representations in the semantic lexicon and that the degree of semantic knowledge makes words more or less vulnerable to retrieval failure. Discussion focuses on the dynamic…

Provides a general analysis of the problem of relating private, cognitive mechanisms of individuals to their public behavior. A computational model of language acquisition is offered. Conclusions are related to Piaget's notion of mutual verification and to some general philosophical questions about learning. (Author/RH)

Connectionist (parallel distributed processing) modeling provides a new way to approach the neurological study of language. This method focuses on the interplay between a computational model and the appropriate neurological, neuropsychological, and speech and language data, couched in connectionist mechanisms that map naturally to what is known of…

This study of rapid picture naming by 20 normally developing children (mean age 11 years) found significant differences between two-and three-dimensional pictures for higher level vocabulary items, but not for lower-level vocabulary items, suggesting that dimensionality may be a critical feature for rapid lexical access for higher-level picture…

Analysis of naturalistic data identified features of adult-child talk which occurred frequently at school but rarely at home. One of these features--question sequences intended to elicit an answer--was used in an intervention study and was found to promote young children's understanding of ambiguity in verbal messages. (PCB)

The hypothesis that children with specific language impairments (SLI) have a hierarchical planning deficit was evaluated with 15 boys (ages 5 to 7) with SLI and 15 controls, who built 4 hierarchical structures varying in complexity. Results did not support the idea that a central hierarchical planning mechanism underlies language and nonlanguage…

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (a parent-report measure of vocabulary and syntax) was administered to 103 children (mean age 103 months) who participated in a study of temporal resolution as infants. Children who had performed above the median on the temporal resolution task demonstrated better later language development than…

This investigation addresses problems of defining verbal imitation, and suggests solutions by analyzing verbal interactions between two children and their mothers. Children were between 18 and 35 months old, with a mean length of utterance between 1.4 and 4.2 morphemes. Analyses focus upon the uses these children made of maternal models; 10…

This review of research discusses how children with autism may acquire equivalence classes after learning to supply a common oral name to each stimulus in a potential class. A proposed methodology for researching referent naming and class formation, analysis of stimulus classes, and generalization is offered. (CR)