Purpose: This study examines the response patterns of 278 Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) on a standardized test of receptive English vocabulary. Method: Investigators analyzed responses to 131 items on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) focusing on differential accuracy on items influenced by…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

Background: It is already known that preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) tend to stutter on function words at the beginning of sentences. It is also known that phonological errors potentially resulting in part-word repetitions tend to occur on content words. However, the precise relation between word class and repetition type in preschool-age…

The following work tries to analyze the possible fossilization errors of the students when acquiring a second foreign language. For this purpose, two languages have been chosen: maternal (Spanish) and foreign (English). In the present work we have examined the effects of the Spanish language and the English language when learning another language…

Purpose: This study examined individual differences in English language learners' (ELLs) nonword repetition (NWR) accuracy, focusing on the effects of age, English vocabulary size, length of exposure to English, and first-language (L1) phonology. Method: Participants were 75 typically developing ELLs (mean age 5;8 [years;months]) whose exposure to…

In native speakers of gender-marking languages, mechanisms of gender production appear to be affected by the morphophonological cues to gender present in the noun phrase. This influence is manifested in higher levels of production accuracy when more transparent cues to gender are present in comparison to when they are not. The goal of the present…

Liaison and elision in French are phonological phenomena that apply across word boundaries. French-speaking children make errors in contexts where liaison/elision typically occurs in adult speech. In this study, we asked if acquisition of French liaison/elision can be explained in a constructivist framework. We tested if children's liaison/elision…

Children with unintelligible speech differ in severity, underlying deficit, type of surface error patterns and response to treatment. Detailed treatment case studies, evaluating specific intervention protocols for particular diagnostic groups, can identify best practice for children with speech disorder. Three treatment case studies evaluated the…

Dutch-English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the…

Lexical-semantic access and retrieval was examined in 15 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. This study extends the literature through the inclusion of multiple examinations of lexical-semantic production within the same patient group and through correlating performance on these tasks with various positive and negative…

This paper investigates the processes that predict reading acquisition. Associations between (a) scaffolding errors (e.g., "torn" misread as "town" or "tarn"), other reading errors, and later reading and (b) vowel and rime inferences and later reading were explored. To assess both of these issues, 50 6-year-old children were shown a number of CVC…

This response to Fey (EC 604 058) presents arguments and examples in support of using concepts of phonological processes and constructs in assessing and treating phonological disorders in children. The paper disagrees with Fey's contention that using the term "process" for "rule" leads to confusion. (Author/DB)

Examines 158 examples of malapropisms and determines three possible sources of this type of error: (1) childhood errors that were never corrected, (2) other kinds of imperfect learning, and (3) breakdown in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon. (AM)

We examined how children with and without oral language (word-finding) difficulties (WFD) perform on oral reading (OR) versus silent reading recognition (SRR) tasks when reading the same words and how lexical factors influenced OR accuracy, error patterns, and nature of miscues. Primary-grade students were administered an experimental reading…