Purpose: This article describes a database that was created in the process of conducting a large-scale epidemiologic study of specific language impairment (SLI). As such, this database will be referred to as the EpiSLI database. Children with SLI have unexpected and unexplained difficulties learning and using spoken language. Although there is no…

This study compared oral personal and fictional narratives of diverse (African American and Caucasian) students with and without learning disabilities. Naturalistic conversation with embedded narrative prompts and supports provided the context for narrative elicitation. The participants were 82 fourth to seventh graders from urban and suburban…

Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here…

Emerging phonotactic knowledge facilitates the development of the mental lexicon, as demonstrated by studies showing that infants use the phonotactic patterns of their native language to extract words from continuous speech. The present study provides a computational account of how infants might induce phonotactics from their immediate language…

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based…

Research has shown a prevalence of psychosocial difficulties ranging from about 20% to 50% among children with hearing loss. This study evaluates the prevalence of psychosocial difficulties in a Danish population in relation to different explanatory variables. Five scales and questionnaires measuring sign language, spoken language, hearing…

Research indicates that oral narrative is the discourse form that functions as a bridge between conversational oral language and language skills that contribute to the acquisition of literacy in children (Westby, 1991). Learning to tell stories, therefore, is important to children's literacy development. Mastering extended discourse tasks such as…

Electropalatometry is a useful clinical and research tool for measuring linguapalatal contact. The goal of this study was to examine intra-speaker variability in performance. Twenty individuals spoke VCV nonsense words using a schwa in the initial position, the 15 palatal consonants, and three corner vowels, /alpha/, /i/, /u/. A variability index…

Learning to recognize the contrasts of a language-specific phonemic repertoire can be viewed as forming categories in a multidimensional psychophysical space. Research on the learning of distributionally defined visual categories has shown that categories defined over 1 dimension are easy to learn and that learning multidimensional categories is…

This article first introduces oracy and literacy education practices in a Japanese kindergarten classroom. The authors then take up three episodes of oral interactions between five-year-old children and their teachers and examined the meaning of these oracy activities as children's building the base in the literacy world. Finally, the authors…

The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on "distributional stress regularity", which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and "durational stress regularity", which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. "Lexical stress patterning"…

Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either "The woman will put the glass…

Bimodal bilinguals are hearing individuals who know both a signed and a spoken language. Effects of bimodal bilingualism on behavior and brain organization are reviewed, and an fMRI investigation of the recognition of facial expressions by ASL-English bilinguals is reported. The fMRI results reveal separate effects of sign language and spoken…

Thirty children with cochlear implants (CI children), age range 3-12 years, and 30 children with normal hearing (NH children), age range 4-6 years, were tested on theory of mind and language measures. The CI children showed little to no delay on either theory of mind, relative to the NH children, or spoken language, relative to hearing norms. The…

One of the limitations of the meaning focused instruction in an EFL situation such as Iran is that a communicative approach helps Iranian learners to become fluent, but is insufficient to ensure comparable levels of oral accuracy. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether planned focus on form, and also what type of corrective feedback,…