The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of…

The few studies that have investigated emotion labeling in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have generally focused on global identification performances and appear contradictory. The current study is a fine-grained examination of how children with SLI and typical peers differ in the accuracy of their emotional lexicon use. Children…

We investigated phonemic competence in production in three age groups of children (7 and 8, 10 and 11, 12 and 13 years) using rhyme and phoneme monitoring. Participants were required to name target pictures silently while monitoring covert speech for the presence or absence of a rhyme or phoneme match. Performance in the verbal tasks was compared…

This paper investigates the relationship between the ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 6-8 years who completed tasks involving reading words, reading pseudowords, stressing pseudowords, and reproducing pseudoword stress patterns. Results showed that the capacity to reproduce…

This study examined effects of lexical factors on children's spoken word recognition across a 1-year time span, and contributions to phonological awareness and nonword repetition. Across the year, children identified words based on less input on a speech-gating task. For word repetition, older children improved for the most familiar words. There…

We investigated the relation of two dimensions of attentional functioning (sustained auditory attention and resource capacity/allocation) and complex sentence comprehension of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for age. Twenty-six school-age children with SLI and 26 TD peers…

Segalowitz and Segalowitz distinguish between "speedup" (mean reaction time [RT] and mean standard deviation of responses in an RT task decrease to the same degree) and "automatization" (mean standard deviation decreases more than mean RT). The coefficient of variation, which is the standard deviation divided by the mean RT, decreases in the case…

In an orally presented vowel length categorization task with both word and nonword stimuli, a group of 10-year-old German speaking poor spellers performed less accurately and consistently slower than a group of formal spellers of the same age. The spellers level of performance was comparable to that of a group of 8-year-old inexperienced…

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…

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)

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)

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)

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…

This study aimed to determine the role of reading-related experience and processing speed on the time it took for children to name familiar stimuli. Children (n=168) were administered measures of global-processing speed, title and author recognition, naming time, and reading ability. Naming times were predicted by age-related change in processing…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) analyze the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners in off-line and on-line tasks and compare their performance with that of adult monolinguals. They conclude that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing (the contiguity assumption), with…