Hadi-Tabassum believes having a separate life context for each language she learned in childhood enabled her to switch easily among five different tongues. She states that the success of dual immersion bilingual programs is largely dependent on whether they immerse students in each of the involved languages separately and help students have a…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

Large and reliable laterality effects have been found using a dichotic target detection task in a recent experiment using word stimuli pronounced with an emotional component. The present study tested the hypothesis that the magnitude and reliability of the laterality effects would increase with the removal of the emotional component and variations…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

Grammaticality judgments and processing times associated with violation detection were examined in typically developing children, children with focal brain lesions (FL) acquired early in life, and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical sensitivity in the FL group, while below typically developing children, was above levels…

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the relative effects of processing instruction, structured input activities and explicit information on the acquisition of gender agreement in Italian adjectives. Subjects were divided into three groups: the first received processing instruction; the second group structured input only; the third…

Neuropsychological models postulate that the memory representation acquired for use in reading words is separate from the one acquired for use in spelling, while developmental models assume that the same representation is developed for access in both reading and spelling. The dual-representation model contends that there is often more precise…

The primary aim of the current study was to identify the strongest independent predictors of reading comprehension using word reading, language and memory variables in a normal sample of 180 children in grades 3-5, with a range of word reading skills. It was hypothesized that orthographic processing, receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory…

Few studies have examined characteristics of both verbal and written language of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study used parallel measures (picture description, word fluency, spelling to dictation, and confrontational naming) to compare verbal and written language of individuals with mild AD, moderate AD, and normal controls (14…

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

It is a matter of debate whether the two differentiated grammatical systems in a bilingual child develop autonomously, or whether there is interdependence and in what areas (Genesee, 2001; Meisel, 2001). Extensive research is being carried out in the emergence of the two grammars, but not much attention has been given to the development of…

The types of gesture+speech combinations children produce during the early stages of language development change over time. This change, in turn, predicts the onset of two-word speech and thus might reflect a cognitive transition that the child is undergoing. An alternative, however, is that the change merely reflects changes in the types of…

This study investigated attention control in tasks involving the processing of relational terms (more highly grammaticized linguistic stimuli: spatial prepositions) and non-relational terms (less highly grammaticized lexical stimuli: nouns) in a first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants were adult bilinguals with greater proficiency in…

Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders present with unusual or odd-sounding prosody. Despite this widely noted observation, prosodic ability in autism spectrum disorders is often perceived as an under-researched area. Aims: This review seeks to establish whether there is a prosodic disorder in autism, what generalizations can…

As the first title in the new series, "New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches", this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates…