Individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) have an auditory short-term memory span disproportionately shorter than the non-verbal mental age (MA). This study evaluated the Baddeley model's claim that verbal short-term memory deficits might arise from slower speaking rates (and thus less material rehearsed in a 2 s passive store) by using the sentence…

It is well known that English and Dutch children often allow pronouns to refer to local ccommanding antecedents, the so-called Principle B Delay. A similar observation has been made for English agrammatics. This phenomenon, which we call the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP), has been argued to be due to children's and agrammatics' difficulties…

Response to intervention (RTI) has little application to the identification of and access to accommodations for adults with learning disabilities (LD). However, the critical topics raised during the reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA; 2004) pertaining to LD eligibility criteria are similar…

A refinement of the verbal process category of MAK Halliday's System of Transitivity makes it possible to distinguish three sub-categories of verbal process: positive, negative and neutral. This in turn makes possible an analysis of negative verbal processes used in a corpus of 50 news texts from the "UK Times" which reveals some of the…

Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary. Study 2…

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals' L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., "piano") and homographs (e.g., "pan")] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses…

How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying "dress" to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9)…

A weakness in accessing the sounds of spoken language represents the most robust and specific correlate of reading disability in young school age children and adolescents. Neurological science and reading research that provides the scientific knowledge regarding this disability is presented.

Children with Specific language Impairment (SLI) have problems with verbal memory, particularly with tasks that have more processing demands. They also have slower speeds of responding for some tasks. To identify the extent to which young children with SLI would differ in performance from age-matched non-impaired children on a set of spatio-visual…

A. Caramazza, A. Costa, M. Miozzo, and Y. Bi (2001) reported a series of experiments showing that naming latencies for homophones are determined by specific-word frequency (e.g., frequency of nun) and not homophone frequency (frequency of nun + none). J. D. Jescheniak, A. S. Meyer, and W. J. M. Levelt (2003) have challenged these studies on a…

The activation of arousal components for emotion-laden words in English (e.g. kiss, death) was examined in two groups of participants: English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, emotion-laden words were rated on valence and perceived arousal. These norms were used to construct prime-target word pairs that were used in…

Unilateral forced nostril breathing (UFNB) through the left nostril is associated with enhanced spatial abilities, whereas UFNB through the right nostril is associated with enhanced verbal abilities. However, the effects of UFNB on standard tasks of laterality (e.g., dichotic listening) are unknown. This study employed dichotic listening for word…

In the first part of this study, we investigated effects of item and task type on span performance in a group of aphasic individuals with word processing and STM deficits. Group analyses revealed significant effects of item on span performance with span being greater for digits than for words. We also investigated associations between subjects'…