In this paper an overview of research on the multilingual lexicon is presented as the basis for a model for processing multiple languages. With respect to specific issues relating to the processing of more than two languages, it is suggested that there is no need to develop a specific model for such multilingual processing, but at the same time we…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs "dovere" (must) and "potere" (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…

This study investigates children's ability to use language to guide their choice of individuation criterion in the domains of objects and events. Previous work (Shipley, E. F., & Shepperson, B. (1990). Countable entities: developmental changes. "Cognition," 34, 109-136.) has shown that children have a strong bias to use a spatio-temporal…

The author explores the language processing ability of children with emotional disorders who have preexisting language delays (ED/LA) to determine whether language difficulties in this population are internal biological features rather than due to environmental variables such as lack of language stimulation in the home. A comparison group…

We report the results of an experiment investigating the ramifications of using space to express coreference in American Sign Language (ASL). Nominals in ASL can be associated with locations in signing space, and pronouns are directed toward those locations to convey coreference. A probe recognition technique was used to investigate the case of…

The well-documented evidence that bilinguals demonstrate cognitive advantages over monolinguals is used as a foundation for the hypothesis that bilinguals will be better able to solve certain spatial tasks, and a theoretical framework for this hypothesis is constructed. The paper describes an experiment to explore this hypothesis. A series of…

As reading and writing are both language processes, one can assume relationships between them, but the exact nature of these relationships has not yet been determined. While a large body of research has addressed reading comprehension and written production independently, very little investigation has examined the possible relationships between…

This study investigates whether second language (L2) phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of nonnative segments by native segments in learners' speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. We adopt a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton's (1975, 1978)…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

This study examined the roles of speech perception and phonological processing in reading and spelling acquisition for native and nonnative speakers of English in the 1st grade. The performance of 50 children (23 native English speakers and 27 native Korean speakers) was examined on tasks assessing reading and spelling, phonological processing,…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Background: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. Aims: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same…