This Commentary supports Gathercole's (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to…

This study addresses the role of output in second language (L2) acquisition by comparing processing instruction (PI) to communicative output (CO) tasks. Participants included 80 English-speaking adults from six university course sections of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each treatment (PI = 27; CO = 28) and two others comprising a…

Microelectrode recordings of human sensori-motor subthalamic neuronal activity during spoken sentence and syllable-repetition tasks provided an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between changes in neuronal activities and specific aspects of these vocal behaviors. Observed patterns of neuronal activity included a build up of activity in…

The objective of this research was to explore whether orthographic learning occurs as a result of phonological recoding, as expected from the self-teaching hypothesis. The participants were 32 fourth- and fifth-graders (mean age = 10 years 0 months, SD = 7 months) who performed lexical decisions for monosyllabic real words and pseudowords under…

In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY").…

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds'…

This paper investigates object omission in French longitudinal production from two English-speaking children (Lightbown, 1977). Similar patterns of object omission are observed: direct objects start being dropped as transitive verbs are emerging and licit and illicit null objects occur in all recordings thereafter. Moreover, the incidence of…

The influence of lexical stress and/or metrical stress on spoken word recognition was examined. Two experiments were designed to determine whether response times in lexical decision or shadowing tasks are influenced when primes and targets share lexical stress patterns (JUVenile-BIBlical [Syllables printed in capital letters indicate those…

Zero-order correlation coefficients show significant relationships between orthography, phonology, rapid naming, visual and auditory memory, and reading and spelling for 143 second through sixth graders. Although coefficients ranged from 0.05 to 0.71, most were statistically significant (65 out of 78). In addition, multiple regression analyses…

We report on an experiment designed to evaluate processing of derived forms in high-functioning dyslexics, defined as university students with a history of reading difficulties who have age-appropriate reading comprehension skills. We compared high-functioning dyslexics with a group of normal adult readers in their performance on a lexical…

Selective verb and noun deficits have been observed in a number of neurological conditions and their occurrence has been interpreted as evidence for different neural networks underlying the processing of specific word categories. We describe the first case of a familial occurrence of a selective deficit of verb processing. Father (Individual I)…

Purpose: The present study investigated the extent of cortical activity during overt picture naming using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Method: Participants comprised 20 healthy, adult participants with ages ranging from 20 to 82 years. While undergoing fMRI, participants completed a picture-naming task consisting of 60…

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…