Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like "Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien" by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

Provides an alternative explanation of the divergent findings appearing in the literature on conceptual tempo and reading acquisition. (HOD)

Reviews research pertaining to metalinguistic awareness in young children; examines issues related to the direction of cause between metalinguistic abilities and reading, disparities in research methodology between studies, and commercial instruments perporting to measure metalinguistic knowledge; and offers implications for reading instruction…

First-language (L1) reading theories are examined from second- language (L2) perspectives to identify significant research voids related to L2 problems. Unique aspects of L2 reading are considered and three distinct areas are discussed: consequences of prior reading experience, effects of cross-linguistic processing, and compensatory devices for…

A study investigated children's ability to distinguish among literal, metaphorical, and anomalous comparisons. The 100 subjects, equal numbers of three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children and college students, completed similarity statements by choosing one of two words from (1) a metaphorical/literal word pair, (2) a literal/anomalous word…

A total of 411 elementary school children seven to twelve years old read short prose passages and selected the most appropriate continuation sentence from four alternatives. The completion sentences were constructed so that the correct (target) response involved either an explicit (simile) or an implicit (metaphor) metaphorical comparison. It was…

A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

Five examples from each of eight classes of auditory stimuli were presented to 65 primary grade children to determine their metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness describes a child's ability to understand the reading register, that special terminology used to teach reading. The children were asked to identify the auditory stimuli as…

A study investigated the hypothesis that, for adult native speakers of English, increasing syntactic complexity would lead to increased salience of phonological properties of words. The study also examined whether syntactic simplicity would lead to a greater salience of semantic properties of words. Subjects were required to name a word presented…

To investigate whether the viewing of printed words influences children's ability to produce plural forms, 120 kindergarten and first grade children were tested individually on 36 items consisting of real words and nonsense syllables that represented three categories: words that required pronouncing the "s" sound as the natural oral plural; words…

The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction,…

A number of issues relating to metaphor are discussed in this report. Offering an account of what makes metaphors "metaphorical" (a way of understanding what metaphors are), the report also discusses some of the psychological processes associated with the comprehension of metaphor (how the understanding of metaphors might come about).…