Examines whether knowledge of functional properties of a referent for a new name influences children's first guesses about whether that name refers to an object or a substance. Suggests that children do not rely on a single source of information, but rather draw on various kind of information, including perceptual characteristics of the entities…

Focuses on a single rule of grammar to produce evidence of a memory system for language acquisition and processing that is modular; independent of real-world meaning; unaffected by frequency and similarity; sensitive to formal distinctions; more sophisticated than the explicitly-taught rules it subsumes; developed independently of ambient input;…

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

The order of acquisition of a set of linguistic structures and the relationship between structures were examined over 5 years in 28 language-impaired children (age 4) and 32 language-matched normal children. Results demonstrated a marked similarity between groups, suggesting that the linguistic impairments may be principally processing, not…

Reviews the second-language research on age-related differences, drawing conclusions regarding learning-age influence on initial acquisition rate and ultimate attainment level; sensitive periods of language development; cumulative age-related loss in ability; and the adequacy of affective, input, and current cognitive explanations for reduced…

While children aged 1;10 and 2;1 show only a modest rate of mapping novel nouns onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects, children aged 1;4 and 1;8 show a high rate. Two studies with young 2-year olds found the noun-mapping preference prevalent, but unless initial choices are strongly reinforced, increase in salience of familiar kinds lures…

A study of 5-year olds' ability to distinguish promises from predictions was suspected to have achieved its results due to methodological problems. A similar study with 32 children ages 5 to 6 that used several variations of the previous study's procedures was found to have similar results, suggesting the earlier findings were an accurate…

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

This paper does a fine job of advancing discussion concerning a question that is indeed quite underrepresented in the literature, that is, how language learners comprehend and produce language in real time. The paper is firmly rooted in the dual mechanism approach to language processing and takes as its starting point the assumption that normal…

Language outcome in children experiencing fluctuant hearing loss due to otitis media (OME) remains highly equivocal. In the current study, we assessed performance on highly sensitive verbal short-term memory (STM), new word learning and phonological processing tasks in 8-year-old children who had suffered from recurrent OME before the age of 3.…

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, "Acquisition by Processing Theory" (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

This paper addresses bilingual children's speech in relation to data from a case study of a child in Wales acquiring English and Spanish between the ages of 1 and 3 years to establish how language choice and code-switching can be recognized in young children. Data is reviewed from the one-word stage, the early two-word combination, and the…