Research suggests that late bilinguals may have persistent difficulties with the automatic access and use of some second language structures because of a lack of underlying integrated knowledge of those structures. In contrast, early bilinguals show advantages in aspects of language use that require this type of automatic knowledge. This study…

Compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. (Author/VWL)

Two studies investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed. (38 references) (JL)