This paper reviews three studies investigating the relationship between brain regions involved in executive control and those involved in reading comprehension in typically-developing teens. In the first study, three regions of posterior left lateral prefrontal cortex (i.e., precentral gyrus, inferior frontal junction, inferior frontal gyrus) were…

This article enters the debate about the complex and dynamical nature of second language acquisition (SLA) by discussing and commenting on Pallotti's critique of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Pallotti's critique brings to the fore the argument that, due to its anti-reductionist stance, CDST research fails to observe three fundamental…

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

This article reconsiders the events that took place at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in Norwich. Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson were invited to speak on the new and controversial subject of aphasia. Over the ensuing decades, there have been repeated references made to a debate between Broca…

It is widely argued that people with autism have difficulty processing ambiguous linguistic information in context. To investigate this claim, we recorded the eye-movements of 24 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and 24 language-matched peers as they monitored spoken sentences for words corresponding to objects on a computer display.…

This review highlights recent doctoral research in the United States completed between the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2007 in the areas of language teaching and language learning. Topics of particular interest included language policy, second/foreign language pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, non-native-speaking teachers, academic…

Behavioral studies indicate deficits in phonological working memory (WM) and executive functioning in dyslexics. However, little is known about the underlying functional neuroanatomy. In the present study, neural correlates of WM in adolescents and young adults with dyslexia were investigated using event-related functional magnetic resonance…

This study examined the relative contributions of measures of Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) cognitive abilities in explaining writing achievement. Drawing from samples that covered the age range of 7 to 18 years, simultaneous multiple regression was used to regress scores from the Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III; Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) that…

This study investigated the relationship between reading comprehension development of 389 adolescents in their dominant language (Language 1 [L1], Dutch) and a foreign language (Language 2 [L2], English). In each consecutive year from Grades 8 through 10, a number of measurements were taken. Students' reading comprehension, their linguistic…

In the influential "simple view of reading" (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), Reading Comprehension (R) = Decoding (D) x Linguistic Comprehension (C). To evaluate this model, this article explores the performance of 15-year-olds with severe reading delays. Results showed that D and C described reading comprehension better than D and verbal cognitive ability…

In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization--schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative analyses applied to 160 personal-experience narratives and expository essays…

A multiple single-case study investigated language characteristics of adolescents with Tourette Syndrome (TS). Ten adolescent subjects with diagnosed TS were evaluated on a test battery sensitive to high level language and discourse impairment. Results were compared to established norms or, where no norms have been established, with results…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing…

A study investigated whether children and adolescents use commas and the principle of Late Closure to guide sentence parsing decisions as adults do in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences. The study consisted of three experiments, conducted similarly but with different subject groups: 24 university students; 24 fourth-graders; and 19…