The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

This study examined the relation between young English language learners' (ELL) native oral language skills and their language input in transitional bilingual education kindergarten classrooms. Spanish-speaking ELLs' ("n" = 101) Spanish expressive language skills were assessed using the memory for sentences and picture vocabulary…

We examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence-picture matching tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term…

Psychological research has emphasized the importance of narrative for a person's sense of self. Building a coherent narrative of past events is one objective of psychotherapy. However, in guided self-help therapy the patient has to develop this narrative autonomously. Identifying patients' narrative skills in relation to psychological distress…

We examined recalled narratives of boys with fragile X syndrome with autism spectrum disorder (FXS-ASD; N = 28) and without ASD (FXS-O; N = 29), and compared them to those of boys with Down syndrome (N = 33) and typically developing (TD) boys (N = 39). Narratives were scored for mentions of macrostructural story grammar elements (introduction,…

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…

We tested the hypothesis that syntactic and narrative comprehension of a natural sign language can serve as the linguistic basis for skilled reading. Thirty-one adults who were deaf from birth and used American Sign Language (ASL) were classified as skilled or less skilled readers using an eighth-grade criterion. Proficiency with ASL syntax, and…

Reports evidence from a longitudinal study showing that the relationship between children's sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration and their success in reading is highly specific and cannot be accounted for in terms of general language ability. (GLR)

Investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragamatics from the perspectives of functional constraints on sentence processing. Findings reveal that native speakers of Italian first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that…

Examined the strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning for simultaneous bilingual infants with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Findings revealed that the correlation was strong, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20% between observations.…