Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

This article tests a prediction made by Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998; 2005) that morphological acquisition is the driving force in English as a second language (ESL) development. It first outlines the model of psycholinguistic processing assumed by Processability Theory and shows how stages fall out from it. It then presents the…

The development of mental imagery in relation to the comprehension of concrete proverbs (e.g., "one rotten apple spoils the barrel") was examined in children, adolescents, and adults who were ages 11 to 29 years old (n = 210). The findings indicated that age-related changes occurred in mental imagery and in proverb comprehension during the years…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

A study compared learning disabled (LD) adolescents with oral expressive problems to non-learning-disabled (NLD) adolescents on a formal operations task, with emphasis on a comparison between non-verbal performance and verbal explanations of the task. This paper reports part of the study, a comparison of two high school freshman subjects. The task…

This study examined the effects of certain contextual linguistic variables on the logical performance of subjects in grades 4, 6, and 12 of selected British Columbia schools as well as some theoretical problems underlying assessment of the development of logical abilities. The task consisted of 27 syllogistic problems based upon the information…

This study examined the conditions for the selection of certain communication strategies in terms of the inferencing ability of the learner, the formal proficiency level attained, and the features of the communicative situation (task requirements). Two groups of 17-year-olds--one studying advanced French and the other French as part of a "core"…

The cognitive processing strategies of two groups of French-English bilinguals were studied by means of an auditory Stroop test designed to evaluate cerebral hemispheric involvement. An "early bilingual" group were bilingual before the age of five, and a "late bilingual" group were bilingual after the age of ten. Stimuli were…

Issues concerning the language of instruction used in teaching English to native speakers of Chinese, particularly adolescents, are discussed. The discussion draws on research in two areas: the role of language medium in the acquisition of concepts, and psycholinguistic differences between Chinese and English. It is concluded that while the…