This study describes the realization of onset and coda clusters in a 4-year old child acquiring American English, and with a higher than usual level of unintelligible speech. It reviews previous studies that have tested cluster realization against markedness and, in particular, the sonority hypothesis. This latter predicts steep rises in sonority…

This paper reports on a study of peer interaction in ten foreign language (FL) classes, six secondary and four primary, over a period of four months. The focus of this paper is the nature of peer interaction, including the purposes of second language use, and language choice. The data, comprising observation, audio and video recordings of five…

The purpose of this study was to begin to examine the relationships between social emotional factors related to resilience as measured by the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) and the degree of impairment as reflected in problem behaviors reported by parents according to the Home Situations Questionnaire (HSQ). A second goal was to…

There is mounting evidence that phonological memory (PM), a sub-component of working memory, is closely related to various aspects of second language (L2) learning in a variety of populations, suggesting that PM may be an essential cognitive mechanism underlying successful L2 acquisition. This article provides a brief critical review of the role…

This study examined the preschool predictors of elementary school narrative writing skills. The sample included 65 typically developing African American children, ranging in age from 5.0 to 5.5 years, and was 44.6% male. Targeted preschool predictors included measures of phonological processing, core language abilities, prereading skills, and…

We investigated the differential role of two frontal regions in the processing of grammatical and semantic knowledge. Given the documented specificity of the prefrontal cortex for the grammatical class of verbs, and of the primary motor cortex for the semantic class of action words, we sought to investigate whether the prefrontal cortex is also…

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented one word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s [Potter, M. C. (1984). Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): A method for studying language processing. In D. Kieras & M. Just (Eds.), "New methods in reading comprehension research" (pp. 91-118).…

The flow of activation from concepts to phonological forms within the word production system was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed distractor pictures that were semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. Eye movements and naming latencies were recorded. The…

The present study adapted the "Blueprint of the Reader" in comprehending language by Perfetti [2000, C. M. Brown & P. Hagoort. (Eds.), "The neurocognition of language" (pp. 167-208). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press] as a framework for understanding Chinese language and reading comprehension in a group of 361 secondary…

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., "the bacon") with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less…

It has been suggested that the effect of word category in noun and verb processing reflects typical word class properties, which can be characterized in terms of semantic as well as syntactic and morphological features. The present study is aimed at differentiating and discussing the relative contribution of these aspects with a main focus on…

Substantial neurobiological data indicate that the dominant cortical region for printed-word recognition shifts from a temporo-parietal (dorsal) to an occipito-temporal (ventral) locus with increasing recognition experience. The circuits also have different characteristic speeds of response and word preferences. Previous evidence suggested that…

Native languages (L1s) are tacitly assumed to be complete and stable in adults. Here we report an unexpected individual variation in judgment of L1 regarding Japanese sentences including honorification, and further clarify its neural basis with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By contrasting an honorification judgment task with a…

There is abundant evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological experiments for the distinction of natural versus artifactual categories and a gender-specific difference: women's performances in cognitive tasks increase when natural categories are used, whereas men's performances increase with artifactual categories. Here, we used the semantic…

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured…