Theories of reading comprehension have widely predicted a role for syntactic skills, or the ability to understand and manipulate the structure of a sentence. Yet, these theories are based primarily on English, leaving open the question of whether this remains true across typologically different languages such as English versus Chinese. There are…

Effects of semantic versus syntactic constraints on resolution of Hebrew heterophonic-homographic words were examined at three reading skill levels. Fourth-and sixth-grade students and a group of adults read aloud sentences containing two types of heterophonic-homographs: noun-noun (e.g., BYCH [Hebrew characters] is read as beitsa 'egg' and bitsa…

Purpose: This study compared English grammatical performance of bilingual school-age children who spoke either Spanish or Vietnamese at home, focusing on their first-language influence on the acquisition of 13 English grammatical forms. Method: Scores from 30 children on a cloze task were analyzed for accuracy, developmental patterns, and error…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

This study investigated the noun definitions given by Cantonese speakers at different ages. Definitional responses on six concrete nouns from 1075 children aged 4;10 to 12;01 and 15 adults were analyzed with reference to the semantic content and the syntactic form. Results showed that conventional definitions produced by Cantonese adult speakers…

This study aims to examine the relationship between bilingual experience and children's development of morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness. To capture both universal and language-specific bilingual effects, the study included four groups of participants: English-speaking children from a general education programme, Spanish-speaking and…