Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic…

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /t/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on…

Children with developmental dyslexia (DD) may differ from typical readers in aspects other than reading. The notion of a general deficit in the ability to acquire and retain procedural ("how to") knowledge as long-term procedural memory has been proposed. Here, we compared the ability of elementary school children, with and without…

Examined aspects of dyslexia as they became apparent during the construction of geometrical figures by one student as described by another, one of whom had dyslexic symptoms. Found that both dyslexic and non-dyslexic children encountered many communication problems, but that directional confusion of dyslexic students was one of the major…

Investigated verbal and nonverbal paired associate learning among 8- to 11-year-old Dutch dyslexic children and chronological-age and reading-age controls. Found that dyslexic children had difficulty with verbal learning of words and nonwords. Phonological and general learning errors were distributed similarly for the reading groups. Found no…

Classic studies in second language (L2) learning offer little evidence for the validity of the notion of universals in L2 learning. The present study investigates this notion in data collected from 15 observational studies of 40 L2 learners who acquired the L2 naturally, that is, they were not taught the language in any formal ways. Interpretation…