This study investigated the recognition of Swedish inflected nouns in two participant groups. Both groups were Finnish-speaking late learners of Swedish, but the groups differed in regard to their Swedish language proficiency. In a visual lexical decision task, inflected Swedish nouns from three frequency ranges were contrasted with corresponding…

Investigated potential influences of general processing capacity and sustained selective attention on the temporal processing of a group of children with specific language impairment and a group of age-matched controls. Results suggest that the SLI children did not evidence a basic temporal processing deficit. (Author/VWL)

Investigated, at three elementary levels, how word reading speed is related to rapidly naming series of numbers, letters, colors, and pictures, and to general processing speed. Also sought to determine how these relationships vary with the reading task employed. (Author/VWL)

Despite the importance of phonemic awareness in beginning literacy, several studies have demonstrated that adults, including teacher trainees, have surprisingly poor phonemic skills. Three experiments investigated whether adults' responses in phonemic awareness and spelling segmentation tasks are based on units larger than single letters and…

Two experiments tested the activation of gender stereotypes for Italian role nouns (e.g., "teacher"). The experimental paradigm was modeled on the one proposed by a study by Banaji and Hardin: participants were shown a prime word followed by a target pronoun ("he" or "she") on which they performed a gender decision task. The prime words were…

Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the…

Discusses studies of dyslexia in German- and English-speaking children. Argues that deficits in phoneme awareness are only evident in the early stages of reading acquisition, whereas rapid naming and phonological memory deficits are more persistent in dyslexic children. (Author/VWL)

First-grade students (n=101) completed two tasks of morphological awareness (MA), one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms. Subjects were also tested for phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and word reading. (Author)

Employed a lexical decision task to asses whether left hemisphere damaged (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients are similarly sensitive to stress patterns in lexical access. Results confirmed that individuals without brain damage are influenced by stress patterns, as indicated by increased lexical decision latencies to incorrectly…

Used an elicited production task and a conventional act-out task (AOT) to study poor readers' difficulties in understanding spoken sentences containing relative clauses. Thirty children (aged 7-8 years) were studied. Results suggest that poor readers' difficulties demonstrating comprehension on the AOT stem from nonsyntactic causes. (102…

Presents results of a study involving 54 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment who are compared with a control group on a referential communication task. The children were asked to describe a picture from an array of eight similar items so that the listener could identify it. (18 references) (GLR)

Previous studies have shown inconsistent results concerning bilinguals' use of gestures to compensate for reduced proficiency in their second language (L2). These results could be because of differing task demands. In this study, we asked 16 intermediate English L2 speakers (whose first language [L1] was Chinese) to watch a story and tell it back…

Tested the prediction that phonemic analysis skills develop as a consequence of reading instruction. The results of a series of phonological tasks that assessed children's sensitivity to subsyllabic onset and rime units, and to phonemes are described. (55 references) (GLR)

Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

Preschool children were assessed on phonological awareness tasks, including rhyme and alliteration matching tasks with distractor items that were either semantically or phonologically related to the target. In both tasks, children found the distractors or the unrelated distractors. Results emphasize the importance of controlling for global…