This article focuses on some of the linguistic components that underlie letter-sound decoding skills and reading comprehension: specifically phonology, morphology, and syntax. Many children who have reading difficulties had language deficits that were detectable before they began reading. Early identification of language difficulties will…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

Patients with damage involving left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (left VLPFC) often show syntactic deficits. They also show exaggerated interference effects during a variety of non-syntactic tasks, including picture naming and working memory. Conceivably, both deficits could arise from inadequate biasing of competitive interactions during…

"Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics (CLP)" and its namesake field have accomplished a great deal in the last quarter of a century. The success of the journal parallels the growth and vitality of the field it represents. The markers of journal achievement are several, including increased number of journal pages published annually; greater diversity…

Educators of young children, including speech-language pathologists, are often uncertain as to how to effectively work with children from diverse backgrounds because they do not know enough about cultural and linguistic diversity and its impact on language development. The current study helps to address this gap by examining the validity of parent…

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to examine how children with isolated speech sound disorders (SSDs; n = 20), children with combined SSDs and language impairment (LI; n = 20), and typically developing children (n = 20), ages 3;3 (years;months) to 6;6, differ in narrative ability. The second purpose was to determine if early narrative…

Studies on the human language system have brought to the fore two key aspects. First, the prime function of language is communication. Second, language exists in the social world. The language learning process takes place within the sociocultural context and the relevant macrostructures that influence language use and development. According to the…

While the predicate-final structure of the Japanese language has been considered one of the main causes of its late projectability (Tanaka, 1999), this study demonstrates that the final predicate component of a "turn constructional unit" (TCU) furnishes a useful resource for conversational participants to negotiate various aspects of interaction.…

Purpose: To investigate children's performance on a fast mapping task. Possible effects across age, dialect group, and clinical status were explored. Method: Participants between the ages of 4 and 9 saw a series of pictured events and heard novel verbs. The novel verbs were in intransitive, transitive, dative, and complement syntactic frames or…

This paper explores the interaction of tone and syntax in Rutooro, a Bantu language of Western Uganda. Rutooro has lost its lexical tone but retains a phrasally defined high pitch that appears on the penultimate syllable--the default position in Bantu. This high pitch can work grammatically and in fact distinguishes between the noun phrase vs.…

This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire…

The standard view maintains that quantifier scope interpretation results from an interaction between different modules: the syntax, the semantics as well as the pragmatics. Thus, by examining the mechanism of quantifier scope interpretation, we will certainly gain some insight into how these different modules interact with one another. To observe…

Our sense of space is part of our experiential universals. However, the incorporation of space into words differs across languages. This paper argues that "space" is lexicalized in English but not in Indonesian. English encodes the sense of location and direction into "adverbial particles," producing language-specific…

A multiple-baseline design across subjects was used to investigate the effects of word prediction and text-to-speech alone and in combination on four narrative composition-writing skills (writing fluency, syntax, spelling accuracy, and overall organization) of six fifth-grade Hispanic boys with specific learning disabilities (SLD). Participants…