The linguistic and cognitive profiles of five deaf adults with a sign language disorder were compared with those of matched deaf controls. The test involved a battery of sign language tests, a signed narrative discourse task and a neuropsychological test protocol administered in sign language. Spatial syntax and facial processing were examined in…

Fifteen children ages 7 to 9 years who had persistent reading difficulties despite adequate instruction were provided with intensive tutorial interventions. The interventions targeted deficient phonological processing and decoding skills for 8 weeks (2 hours per day) followed by an 8-week, 1-hour-per-day intervention that focused on the…

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought,…

This study examines well-compensated adults with dyslexia to see if they experience more problems with pragmatic awareness than the normal population. Social interaction requires an individual to process language at speed by using working memory efficiently, in order to understand the intended, rather than literal, meaning between speaker and…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…

A popular theoretical account of developmental language and literacy disorders implicates poor auditory temporal processing in their etiology, but evidence from studies using behavioral measures has yielded inconsistent results. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential has been recommended as an alternative,…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the on-line processing mechanisms used by young children to comprehend pronouns. The work focuses on their use of two highly relevant sources of information: (1) the gender and number features carried by English pronouns, and (2) the differing accessibility of discourse entities, as influenced by…

A number of researchers have suggested that formulaic sequences are stored and processed holistically (Altenberg, 1998; Raupach, 1984; Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Spottl & McCarthy, 2004). However, the evidence for this hypothesis has not been conclusive. The present study examined the representation and processing of formulaic sequences in two online…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

Background/Context: Diane Ravitch has focused on the extensive censorship occurring within the publication of school textbook and testing materials in her book, "The Language Police" (2003). This book, indicative of conservative frustrations with minority special interest groups, raises several key issues echoed throughout the larger educational…

One of the ways to investigate the mental lexicon is to use word association tests. Empirical studies comparing associations by children and adults have indicated a tendency for children to give syntagmatic responses, whereas adults give paradigmatic responses. In order to investigate lexical development in L2 acquisition of Swedish we collected…

It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested…

A discussion of language development and its role in the educational process focuses on the ways in which children use language to order experience. It is proposed that if human experience is construed in the form of language, then the way in which language is acquired can give insight into the fundamental nature of learning. These conclusions are…

The most important skill teachers can communicate through reading experiences is the awareness of what kinds of questions to ask with different kinds of texts. These questions are not the factual questions that drift in and out of short term memory but the implicit questions, the thought-provoking "big questions." Some teachers…

The bare fact is that the speaker's words are nothing until the listener gives them meaning. The denotation of a word is developed through association with other words. The connotation is the more difficult concept to establish for the critical/comprehensive listener studying word meaning. The common explanation is that "connotation refers to…