In this study we examined syntactic ambiguity resolution in two different Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin, which are relatively similar grammatically but very different phonologically. We did this using four-character sentences that could be read using two, two-syllable sequences (2-2) or a structure where the first syllable could be read by itself. The results showed that when both potential readings were semantically congruent, Mandarin speakers had a strong preference for the 2-2 structure and they preferred that structure much more than Cantonese speakers did. We attribute this to Mandarin having a more dominant bisyllabic prosodic foot than Cantonese. When the 2-2 meaning was semantically incongruent, however, the alternative structure was preferred by both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. Overall, the results suggest that, in silent reading tasks and semantically neutral conditions, the prosodic foot is generated automatically and can affect syntactic choices when ambiguity arises.

The investigation longitudinally examined the phonetic skills of Cypriot-Greek children with late onset of expressive vocabulary. The rate of phonological development within short time increments and the identification of possible speech constraints motivating slow development of expressive language were examined. Participants were seven Cypriot-Greek children identified as late talkers, and seven age-matched normally developing counterparts. Phonetic skills were examined at ages 30, 33, and 36 months for both groups based on spontaneous language samples. Phonological analyses focused on the construction of all subjects' phonetic inventories over time. Both groups exhibited an increase of specific phoneme use over time. Late talkers had significantly poorer phonetic inventories when compared to the control group. Within the experimental group the analysis revealed the persistent omission of word-initial consonants. Results are discussed in terms of language-specific phonological constraints and their relation to slow development of speech.

To examine interactions between young children's vocabulary size and their phonological abilities, spontaneous language samples were collected from 24-month-olds with precocious lexicons, their age mates (24-month-olds with average-sized lexicons), and their vocabulary mates (30-month-olds with average-sized lexicons). Phonological ability was measured in a variety of ways, such as the number of different consonants that were targeted, the number of different consonants produced correctly, the percentage of consonants produced correctly, and the occurrence of phonological processes. The lexically precocious 24-month-olds were similar to their vocabulary mates on most measures of phonological ability, and both of these groups were generally superior to the 24-month-olds with smaller lexicons. These findings supported a hypothesized relationship between lexicon size and phonological performance, and demonstrated that 2-year-olds' phonological development is more closely related to size of the lexicon than chronological age.

This study investigated the role of phonological memory (PM) in second language (L2) speech production by English-speaking adults who were learning Spanish. PM, operationalized as serial nonword recognition, and L2 lexical, narrative, and grammatical abilities from speech samples were assessed 13 weeks apart. After controlling for the amount of speech output, PM contributed significantly to the development of L2 narrative skills for less proficient participants (17.5% of variance explained) and to gains in correct use of function words for more proficient participants (15.7% of variance explained). These findings suggest that PM plays an important role in narrative development at earlier stages of L2 learning and in the acquisition of grammatical competence at later stages.

Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-year-olds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time to master the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context.

Can fluency in oral reading be facilitated by formatting text to preserve major syntactic boundaries? Seven-, 8-, and 9-year-old children read aloud passages under two text format conditions. In the structure-preserving condition, the ends of lines coincided with ends of clauses; in the phrase-disrupting condition, line breaks always interrupted a phrasal unit. Experiment 1 showed that oral reading fluency, as indexed by skill in phrasal reading, was rated higher when children were reading in the structure-preserving condition. In addition, the structure-preserving condition resulted in significantly fewer false starts at the beginning of lines following a return sweep. The results of Experiment 2, in which texts of varying levels of difficulty were read by slightly older readers, confirmed both findings. Measures of fluency were correlated with other language and reading measures; however, no effects of format were obtained on oral reading rate (words correct per minute). Taken as a whole, these findings indicate a benefit of keeping clausal units intact in promoting fluent reading by facilitating the transition from one line to the next.

This study investigates three aspects of social communication in 12-month-old infants and their caregivers: (a) caregiver conversational style, (b) caregiver gesture, and (c) infant engagement. Differences in caregiver behavior during passive joint engagement were associated with language outcomes. Although total mean duration of infant time in passive joint engagement was negatively associated with later language, caregiver contingent comments (CCCs) addressed to infants during passive joint engagements related to language learning. CCC utterances were found to co-occur with gesture, suggesting that CCC is an inherently multimodal conversational style. The positive association between CCCs during passive joint engagements and later language suggests that caregiver behavior is important, even at times when infants are not actively engaged with the caregiver.

This study compared monosyllabic word recognition in quiet, noise, and noise with reverberation for 15 monolingual American English speakers and 12 Spanish–English bilinguals who had learned English prior to 6 years of age and spoke English without a noticeable foreign accent. Significantly poorer word recognition scores were obtained for the bilingual listeners than for the monolingual listeners under conditions of noise and noise with reverberation, but not in quiet. Although bilinguals with little or no foreign accent in their second language are often assumed by their peers, or their clinicians in the case of hearing loss, to be identical in perceptual abilities to monolinguals, the present data suggest that they may have greater difficulty in recognizing words in noisy or reverberant listening environments.

Traditional models of human memory have postulated the need for a brief phonological or verbatim representation of verbal input as a necessary gateway to a higher level conceptual representation of the input. Potter has argued that meaningful sentences may be encoded directly in a conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) running parallel in time to such a phonological store. The primary aim of the current study was to evaluate two main tenets of the CSTM model: that linguistic context biases selection of information entering the conceptual store, and that information not integrated into a coherent structure is rapidly forgotten. Results confirmed these predictions for spoken sentences heard by both young and older adults, supporting the generality of the model and suggesting that CSTM remains stable in normal aging.