Tests of phonology, semantics, and syntax were administered to 52 preschool children (ages 4-6) with speech sound disorders. Language impairment at school-age (ages 8-11) related to poor performance on preschool tests of syntax and nonsense word repetition, while reading impairment was predicted by poor performance in all preschool test domains.…

To test the concept of "shape of information," 72 participants (half from an academic setting, half from the general public) examined 24 documents typically used in the academic environment. Results indicated that when document shape was evident, the document was immediately discernible to participants; when participants were required to…

Dutch-English bilinguals performed a generalized lexical decision task on triplets of items, responding with "yes" if all items wee correct Dutch and/or English words, and with "no" if one or ore of the items was not a word in wither language. Semantic priming effects were found in on-line response times. Event-related…

A study investigated generalization effects of script-based intervention in increasing semantic relation skills among four Korean preschoolers with language disorders. The script-based intervention was effective at increasing all participants' use of semantic relation skills and generalizing the acquired semantic relation skills across non-trained…

Presents data from the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals that exemplify a contact situation that gives rise to a process called structural interference. Concentrates on the use of the diminutive in the Spanish of speakers of Spanish in the Andes. (Author/VWL)

The research investigated the time course of integrative semantic processing during sentence processing. Reading time was measured on sentences containing an NP composed of an adjective and a noun whose combined meaning was plausible or anomalous (Experiment 1) or was typical or atypical (Experiment 2). The noun in the NP was either plural or…

The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…

This study examines the relationship between ESL learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their lexical inferencing strategy use, and their success in deriving word meaning from context. Participants read a passage containing 10 unknown words and attempted to derive the meanings of the unknown words from context. Introspective think-aloud…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Background: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. Aims: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same…

Using a think-aloud procedure this study explored why certain vocabulary interventions are more facilitative for word learning than others. Second Language (L2) readers' "quality" and "quantity" (Hulstijn, 2001) of word processing strategies were recorded to determine the effect on (a) establishing and (b) strengthening lexical…

This study explores emerging lexical processes that may be the foundation for children's acquisition of morphological knowledge and the relation of these processes to reading comprehension. First and third graders were given two tasks involving lexical analysis of morphologically complex words. Two years later, they were given a measure of…

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

We report two experiments examining the role of concreteness and word phonological neighborhood characteristics on immediate serial recall. In line with previous findings concreteness, word frequency, and larger neighborhood size are associated with better serial recall. Both concreteness and word neighborhood size were also positively associated…

The "perceptual loop theory" of speech monitoring (Levelt, 1983) claims that inner and overt speech are monitored by the comprehension system, which detects errors by comparing the comprehension of formulated utterances to originally intended utterances. To test the perceptual loop monitor, speakers named pictures and sometimes attempted to halt…