Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial…

Seventy-nine 3- and 4-year-old children were tested on gaze-reporting ability and Wellman and Liu's (2004) continuous measure of theory of mind (ToM). Children were better able to report where someone was looking when eye and head direction were provided as a cue compared with when only eye direction cues were provided. With the exception of…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated sentence comprehension and spatial working memory abilities in a sample of internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized (PI) children. The authors compared the performance of these PI children with that of an age-matched group of children living with their birth families. They hypothesized that PI…

Purpose: The authors studied the effect of the cochlear implant (CI) on language comprehension and production in deaf children who had received a CI in the 2nd year of life. Method: The authors evaluated lexical and morphosyntactic skills in comprehension and production in 17 Italian children who are deaf (M = 54 months of age) with a CI and in 2…

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…

Background: Narratives have been used by a number of researchers to investigate the language of children with specific language impairment (SLI). While a number of explanations for SLI have been proposed, there is now mounting evidence that children with SLI have limited memory resources. Phonological memory has been the focus of the research on…

Two studies were conducted to compare the advance organizer and concept elaboration models of instruction with a task analysis approach. It was hypothesized that the concept elaboration group would achieve significantly higher than either the advance organizer group or the task analysis group on concept learning and principle learning. A pilot…