The present study investigates the development of grammatical aspects of narrative structure in child L1 and adult L2 acquisition in a comparative perspective. The narratives were elicited through a picture story task. In the theoretical part of the study, this task is analyzed in semantic and psycholinguistic terms. In the empirical part of the study, it is demonstrated that narratives relating to an early phase of adult L2 acquisition show strong global cohesion, whereas narratives by child L1 learners tend to have very weak cohesion up to around 5 years of age. In a second developmental phase, however, the situation is observed to be the reverse: whereas child L1 learners become very much concerned with narrative structure and accomplish very strong cohesion, adult L2 learners tend to experience a dip in performance. The observed developmental asymmetry is interpreted as indicative of a difference in cognitive resources and sociocommunicative skills between the two types of learners.

This study examined relationships among measures of language proficiency, cognitive style, and metaphor comprehension. Subjects were university students who were native English speakers or who were enrolled in a course on English as a second language (ESL). Consistent with predictions, native English speakers scored better than ESL students on academic measures of English proficiency, but there were no group differences on level of cognitive sophistication in English metaphor interpretation or on a measure of metaphor fluency (number of metaphor interpretations produced). For ESL students, metaphor fluency was positively related to a measure of English communicative proficiency, whereas a measure of field independence was negatively related with both metaphor fluency and communicative proficiency. These findings on cognitive style are consistent with theoretical predictions that have heretofore found little empirical support in the second language literature.

Phonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to be related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic knowledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphological awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms.

Research from several sources indicates that reading disability is often associated with difficulty in comprehending some complex spoken sentences, including those with relative clauses. The present study exploits a new methodology, elicited production, to identify the source of comprehension difficulties of poor readers. Both the elicited production task and a conventional act-out task were employed in a study of 30 children (aged 7-8), who were selected for reading ability. On the act-out task, the poor readers displayed a high error rate on two relative clause structures (SO and OO relatives), as had been found by Mann, Shankweiler, and Smith (1984), but these structures were elicited from the poor readers as successfully as from the good readers (on more than 80% of trials).

Children's heuristics for word learning have been the focus of much research, but little is known about bilinguals' and monolinguals' comparative use of them. In this study, 36 Serbian/ English bilinguals and 42 English monolinguals, who were between 5 and 8 years old and lived in the same neighborhoods in the United States, received a successive name training assessment of two heuristics: criterial use of highlighted features and preservation of mutual exclusivity. Older children employed both heuristics more often than younger ones. Monolinguals were more likely than bilinguals to interpret a highlighted feature as a necessary condition for applying a new English object name, but the groups did not differ in their tendency to maintain mutual exclusivity between the extensions of two novel English labels.