The cross-overs between monolingual-bilingual and typically atypically developing children are a goldmine for research on language development. The four permutations of language exposure and language abilities create "natural experimental conditions" for investigating the nature of the language capacity and how this is shaped by input in typical…

Arabic Literacy acquisition was studied among Israeli Palestinian low socioeconomic status kindergartners within the framework of an intervention study, implemented by teachers. On pretest, letter naming, alphabetic awareness, and phonological awareness were very low. Whereas the comparison group hardly progressed throughout the year, the…

Lying is a deliberate attempt to transmit messages that mislead others. Analysis of language behaviors holds great promise as an objective method of detecting deception. The current study reports on the frequency of use and acoustic nature of "um" and "like" during laboratory-elicited lying versus truth-telling. Results obtained using a…

Because words represent the building blocks upon which the facility to produce and comprehend language at all levels is based, the capacity of a child to learn words has immense impact on his or her developing abilities to communicate and engage properly with the outside world. Both the Keynote Article and the Commentaries in this issue…

Examines the phonetic characteristics of babbling by a pair of fraternal twins raised in a bilingual environment (English/Serbian). The study focused on the basic articulatory form of babbling, the impact of twinship on babbling patterns, and whether effects specific to one or another of the ambient languages could be observed. (30 references)…

Explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. The study suggests that even language-delayed six year olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between the groups studied (first graders, young adults, language-delayed first graders) are discussed. (55…

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic…

Describes the preliminary findings in the Basque Country of a project shared by four European countries to teach a second language or a foreign language to preschool and school-age children. The method used to teach the foreign language--English--is based on the use of dramatized formats. Examines level of language proficiency achieved with each…

Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…

Focuses on the acquisition of negation in American Sign Language (ASL) and the developmental relationship between the communicative and grammatical (or linguistic) headshakes for negation in deaf children acquiring ASL. Results indicate that the systems for communication and language are differentially mediated. (35 references) (Author/CK)

Describes the "Competition Model" (Bates and MacWhinney, 1982) dealing with second-language sentence processing by bilinguals and research that has further developed theories dealing with the model. (CB)

Discusses the code-switching in English and Spanish of adjectives or nouns inside a noun phrase containing both. Proposes that the device that prevents switched prenominal Spanish adjectives is the same one that prevents the same classes of adjectives from normally appearing in prenominal position in Spanish. (SED)

Attempts to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it, focusing on its use in the domain of schizophrenic speech, to provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations. (Author/CB)

Describes a study in which two nonspeech communication systems were evaluated with respect to their efficacy for use with profoundly retarded nonspeech children. Results show that 53 profoundly retarded children who have failed to acquire expressive linguistic skills can succeed with some alternative nonspeech symbol systems, especially with…