Previous studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

Comparison of two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in an introductory college French course suggested that the "Garden Path" technique, where teachers presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the exception, was less effective than simply teaching the exception as an exception. (Author/CB)

To examine possible explanations of reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, study compared repetitions of 54 SLI children and peers for number and type of error, latency, and duration of response. Found no evidence of differences between groups in auditory discrimination or response…

The performance of multilingual subjects was contrasted to that of bilingual and monolingual subjects on two tasks that involved learning a miniature linguistic system. Results indicate that multilingual subjects have strategies that help them allocate processing resources more efficiently in formulating informal rules of limited scope under…

Examines the consonant substitution, sequencing, omission, and addition errors of severely reading disabled teenagers in recognizing consonants in orthographically regular nonwords, and compares the results with responses to identical stimuli by normal children of the same age and reading level groups. (Author/DJD)

Compared the vowel responses of severely disabled readers with those of normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. Vowel responses were compared on both age and reading level groups, and the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. (Author/DJD)

Comparison of normal-speaking (N=20) and misarticulating (N=20) four- to six-year-olds and adults (N=16) revealed that adults were significantly more accurate in detecting mispronunciations than either group of children, while performance between the two groups of children was similar. Words that children found most difficult were also those on…

Examines the source of poor readers' comprehension failures in spoken sentences containing complex syntactic structures. Although research literature indicates that the difficulties poor readers display are usually associated with some aspect of phonological processing, other components of language processing may be involved. (58 references)…

Compares the different criteria used to identify poor spellers and readers from good spellers and readers. Findings reveal that visual memory of orthographic sequences may help to differentiate between poor and good spellers. (CB)

Examines a task that can be applied in a uniform fashion across different languages to compare levels of vocabulary development in foreign-language learning. Results indicate that the lexical decision task can be a useful tool for the assessment and cross-linguistic comparison of lexical development in foreign-language learning. (37 references)…

Investigation of associations between learning-disabled children's ability to repeat pseudowords and their performances on other measures of phonological processing and academic achievement found that repetition ability was more closely related to reading and spelling skills than to mathematics achievement, while measures of phonological skills…