The cognitive mechanisms for writing to dictation of Chinese syllables by healthy adults were investigated using large-sample multiple regression analyses. In the experiment, subjects wrote down a corresponding character upon hearing a syllable. We mainly examined the effects of three types of attributes (i.e., lexical, semantic, and phonology to…

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…

This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and…

Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed three important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the…

English is written with interword spacing, and eliminating it negatively affects English readers. Chinese is written without interword spacing, and adding it does not facilitate Chinese readers. "Pinyin" (romanized Chinese) is written with interword spacing. This study investigated whether adding interword spacing facilitates reading in Chinese…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…

Examined whether phonological decoding could be observed among severely and profoundly deaf children during reading. The ability of 20 deaf children to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudo words was investigated. Results suggest a link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills. Implications of…

Studied the symbolic knowledge of children, between three and five years of age who knew the alphabet but could not read, in associating letters of the alphabet with the letter's symbolic sounds. (21 references) (GLR)

Analysis of hearing-impaired adolescents' signed and written sentences expressing simple locative state relations found noun reversal and pragmatic focus errors in 7 percent of signed and 15 percent of written responses. Most errors were produced by profoundly hearing-impaired signers attending public day school. (Author/CB)

Comparison of the performance of 25 deaf Italian adolescents and hearing controls on written grammatical tests found that the deaf subjects showed normal development in pluralization tasks, delayed development in pronoun tasks, and a qualitatively different pattern in an article task. (Author/CB)

To determine whether written spelling is superior to oral spelling for children in kindergarten through Grade 2, this study compared children's ability to spell real words and nonsense words orally and in writing. By first and second grade, written spellings were superior to oral spellings in both overall quality and representation of phonological…

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)

Examines individual differences in the ability to integrate information from word parts and context in interpreting novel kanji compounds. Also investigated the relationship between students' beliefs about the effectiveness of using kanji and/or contextual clues and their abilities to use the clues. (Author/VWL)

Testing of deaf readers' comprehension of relative clause structures in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language suggests that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate good from poor deaf readers, but rather a processing deficit may underlie poor readers' comprehension difficulties. (Author/CB)