Research on adult age differences in language production has traditionally focused on either the production of single words or the properties of language samples. Older adults are more prone to word retrieval failures than are younger adults (e.g., Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991). Older adults also tend to produce fewer ideas per utterance…

An American English teacher argues that the teachers should value students' home language and use it to help them become more effective rhetoricians. She offers five steps that an educator should take to help the students, some of them being to educate one in order to understand AAVE (African American Vernacular English), to incorporate…

The author shares activities for use in the primary classroom that require active participation with nursery rhymes through dramatization. The activities involve repeated readings, reading in context, and examining rhyming components, and help to develop young children's phonemic awareness and oral language skills.

This article presents the results of a quasi-experimental study of whether there exists a causal relationship between spoken language and the initial learning of reading/writing. The subjects were two matched samples each of 24 preschool pupils (boys and girls), controlling for certain relevant external variables. It was found that there was no…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the satisfaction levels of Silicon Valley employers with the communication skills of newly hired college graduates. Employers reported that oral and written communication skills needed improvement in several areas, including the use of vocabulary and self-expression. College graduates' skills are not always…

Studies conducted in recent years on oral and written language production show that the age at which words are learned is the main variable that influences lexical access in both hearing people and people who have suffered brain lesions. No studies have been done with deaf people and, since they use sign language in addition to oral language,…

Early language competence in preschool relates both directly and indirectly to elementary school reading in both 1st and 3rd grades. Further, comprehensive language skills are more strongly related to early reading than are vocabulary scores alone. In response to a challenge by S. A. Bracken (2005), the current article reaffirms the National…

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named…

As was this author's usual habit at the university in Nebraska where she was teaching, she picked up a copy of the campus newspaper to read during her office hours. She was dismayed at a story entitled "Lakota May Appear on Sheridan County Polls." It read, in part: "Sheridan County's polls may have to add an unexpected language to…

A Cantonese syllable-spotting experiment was conducted to examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), can apply in Cantonese speech segmentation. In the experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese syllable from a series of nonsense sound strings. Results…

Formulaic sequences are fixed combinations of words that have a range of functions and uses in speech production and communication, and seem to be cognitively stored and retrieved by speakers as if they were single words. They can facilitate fluency in speech by making pauses shorter and less frequent, and allowing longer runs of speech between…

Background: Studies of language in children with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment (HI) indicate that they often have problems in phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and that they have linguistic weaknesses both in vocabulary and morphosyntax similar to children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, children with HI may be more…

Two experiments were conducted to provide a window on the processes by which the accuracy and rate of reading develop during psycholinguistic treatment for dyslexia. In experiment 1,140 children with dyslexia followed a treatment method that presented them with a learning system that clarifies the basic elements and operations by which one's…

Purpose: Prosodic cues are used to clarify sentence structure and meaning. Two studies, one of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and one of adults with a history of learning disabilities, were designed to determine whether individuals with poor language skills recognize prosodic cues on par with their normal-language peers. Method:…

Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers were examined in a three-year longitudinal study that began at school entry. The discrepancy-defined (dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) were identified in terms of poor reading comprehension and average or above average listening comprehension…