The aim of this study was to compare the prosodic profiles of English- and Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS), examining cross-linguistic differences. Two groups of children with WS, English and Spanish, of similar chronological and nonverbal mental age, were compared on performance in expressive and receptive prosodic tasks from the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech–Communication Battery in its English or Spanish version. Differences between the English and Spanish WS groups were found regarding the understanding of affect through prosodic means, using prosody to make words more prominent, and imitating different prosodic patterns. Such differences between the two WS groups on function prosody tasks mirrored the cross-linguistic differences already reported in typically developing children.

Despite acknowledgement of the limited English vocabularies demonstrated by many language minority (LM) learners, few studies have identified skills that relate to variation in vocabulary growth in this population. This study investigated the concurrent development of morphological awareness (i.e., students’ understanding of complex words as combinations of meaningful smaller units) and vocabulary for LM learners in early adolescence. A cohort of Spanish-speaking LM learners (n = 90) was followed from fourth through seventh grade and assessed annually. Latent growth modeling results indicated a strong relationship between rates of growth in the two skills, such that learners with rapid growth in derivational morphological awareness also demonstrated rapid growth in vocabulary. Despite positive vocabulary growth during this period, the learners remained far below national norms. Findings highlight the need for language-focused instructional intervention for this population and suggest that morphological awareness may be a promising point of leverage for such instruction.

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels “colored” by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was intended to elicit the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component, a negative deflection typically seen at central midline scalp sites about 200 ms after the presentation of a “deviant” acoustic stimulus occurring among a train of “standard” acoustic stimuli. VV coarticulation at near and medium distances was associated with significant MMN-like effects, which however were not observed in response to the longest distance coarticulatory contrasts. Subjects' ERP results did not predict their performance on the behavioral task, which found evidence of listener sensitivity to even the furthest distance coarticulatory effects. Although the MMN has previously been shown to be sensitive to phonemic contrasts, this is the first study using ERP methodology to investigate the subphonemic processing associated with the perception of coarticulation.

Previous studies have demonstrated a link between language behaviors and deception; however, questions remain about the role of specific linguistic cues, especially in real-life high-stakes lies. This study investigated use of the so-called filler, “um,” in externally verifiable truthful versus deceptive speech of a convicted murderer. The data revealed significantly fewer instances of “um” in deceptive speech. These results are in line with our recent study of “um” in laboratory elicited low-stakes lies. Rather than constituting a filled pause or speech disfluency, “um” may have a lexical status similar to other English words and may be under the strategic control of the speaker. In an attempt to successfully deceive, humans may alter their speech, perhaps in order to avoid certain language behaviors that they think might give them away.

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., chot-ure) or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., chot-ore). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic (ma lade), morphological (mal ade), morphological + 1 grapheme (mala de), or unsegmented (malade). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words.

The effects of the age of acquisition (AoA) of words were examined in the clinical treatment of 10 preschool children with phonological delays. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline experimental design, children were enrolled in one of four conditions that varied the AoA of the treated words (early vs. late acquired) relative to their corresponding word frequency (high vs. low frequency). Phonological generalization to treated and untreated sounds in error served as the dependent variable. Results showed that late acquired words induced greater generalization, with an effect size four times greater than early acquired words, whereas the effects of word frequency were minimized. Results are discussed relative to hypotheses about the role of AoA in language acquisition and the relevance of this variable for phonological learning.

This study examined whether high-variability auditory training on natural speech can benefit experienced second-language English speakers who already are exposed to natural variability in their daily use of English. The subjects were native French speakers who had learned English in school; experienced listeners were tested in England and the less experienced listeners were tested in France. Both groups were given eight sessions of high-variability phonetic training for English vowels, and were given a battery of perception and production tests to evaluate their improvement. The results demonstrated that both groups learned to similar degrees, suggesting that training provides a type of learning that is distinct from that obtained in more naturalistic situations.

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves greater computational complexity. An analysis of spontaneous language samples of 18 French-speaking adolescents with SLI, compared to groups of typically developing speakers, showed that whereas complexity increases with age in the latter, behaviors of avoidance are clear in the former, in the form of low frequencies of complex structures, but also frequency of failed attempts and alternative strategies. Whereas increasing complexity is the hallmark of syntactic development after childhood, avoidance of complexity appears to characterize SLI after childhood.

We investigate the production of subject and object who- and which-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.