The aim of this study was to compare linguistic and narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers and to estimate linguistic predictors of the macro-structural level of narratives. A battery of linguistic measures in Italian was administered to sixty-four Monolinguals and sixty-four Early Bilinguals; it included Vocabulary,…

Generic language ("Owls eat at night") expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ("All owls eat at night") and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics…

This paper is based upon a longitudinal study of L2 attrition in a bilingual child who grew up in an L2 migration background (Germany) and moved to the country of origin (Portugal) at the age of nine, experiencing a "dominance shift from the L2 to the L1." The study aims to analyze the effects of language loss in L2 German. Data…

This study investigated the role of sequential processing in spoken language outcomes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), ages 5;3-11;4, by comparing them to children with typical hearing (TH), ages 6;3-9;7, on sequential learning and memory tasks involving easily nameable and difficult-to-name visual stimuli. Children who are DHH…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5-12;3), twenty…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the contribution of phonological and general language skills to reading fluency of pointed and unpointed Hebrew scripts. Reading, language and memory tasks were performed by 48 fifth-grade monolingual native Hebrew speakers. Results showed that the most marked predictor for both pointed and unpointed…

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n = 68) and adults (n = 19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed…

Two studies test the hypotheses that individual differences in phonological memory among children younger than two years can be assessed using a non-word repetition task (NWR) and that these differences are related to the children's rates of vocabulary development. NWR accuracy, real word repetition accuracy and productive vocabulary were assessed…

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7, and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. (Author/SW)

Twenty-two five-year olds who judged, identified, repaired, and explained phonological and morphological errors performed significantly better on phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analyzed and to differences in memory demands…

Sentences written in either an expanded or optionally deleted form were read for imitation and delayed recall to a group of nursery school children and a group of adults. Results and their implications are discussed. (Author/RM)

Investigated the relationship between children's failures to produce unambiguous utterances and the mental effort demands in children (ages five, six, seven, and nine years), using finger-tapping and message production tasks, separately and simultaneously. Findings suggest that the relative effort requirements of communication decrease with…

Reviews the proceedings of a 1971 conference on the relationships between speech and learning to read, and discusses related literature and research under these topics: acquisition of speech and reading, the deaf child's language acquisition, orthography and linguistic awareness, reading maturity and age: short-term memory, and attaining fluent…

Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in the young child. (Author/RM)