Many previous studies of children's spelling have adopted a narrow approach,examining one linguistic structure at a time and paying little attention to differences amongchildren or changes with development. We broadened the focus by examining two different, butpotentially related, patterns (stressed syllabic /r/ and letter-name vowels) and by trackingchanges in performance from fall to spring of first grade. The results show how children movefrom using one letter for each phonological unit (e.g., SR for sir; KON for cone) to appreciating the function of “extra” letters (e.g., the vowel letters i of sir and e of cone). Errors such as SRE for sir may arise during this process, reflecting an overgeneralization of the silent e pattern. The results are generally consistent with the view that spelling becomes more “orthographic” with development. However, the course of development is not always as predicted by existing stage theories.

Based on the Competition Model, the present study investigated how adult monolinguals andbilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-à-vis intrasententialcues (animacy and word order). The subjects were L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese and English.The results show that both Chinese and English monolingual controls paid less attention tocontext than to intrasentential cues that have been identified as determinants for Chinese andEnglish sentence processing. Nevertheless, context was found to play a bigger role in Chinesethan in English. As for L2 learners, the main effect of context was significant in all groups oflearners of Chinese and English. However, the Chinese EFL learners relied on context to a greaterextent than did the English CFL learners when processing their respective L2.

This article presents a new method that can compare lexical priming (word–word) andsentential priming (sentence–word) directly within a single paradigm. We show that it canbe used to address modular theories of word comprehension, which propose that the effects ofsentence context occur after lexical access has taken place. Although lexical priming andsentential priming each occur very quickly in time, there should be a brief time window in whichthe former is present but the latter is absent. Lexical and sentential priming of unambiguous wordswere evaluated together, in competing and converging combinations, using time windowsdesigned to detect an early stage where lexical priming is observed but sentential priming is not.Related and unrelated word pairs were presented visually, in rapid succession, within auditorysentence contexts that were either compatible or incompatible with the target (the second word ineach pair). In lexical decision, the additive effects of lexical priming and sentential priming werepresent under all temporal conditions, although the latter was always substantially larger. Incross-modal naming, sentential priming was present in all temporal conditions; lexical priming wasmore fragile, interacting with timing and sentential congruence. No evidence was found for astage in which lexical priming is present but sentential priming is absent – a finding that isdifficult to reconcile with two-stage models of lexical versus sentential priming. We conclude thatsentential context operates very early in the process of word recognition, and that it can interactwith lexical priming at the earliest time window.

Two empirical studies set out to explore the relation between breadth and depth of wordknowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input.In the first study, the breadth and depth of word knowledge of 50 Dutch monolingual andbilingual kindergartners were investigated using receptive vocabulary, description, and associationtasks. The second study examined the relation between the probability of knowing a word and theinput frequency of that word in 1,600 Dutch monolingual and bilingual 4- and 7-year-olds. Thesestudies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary,and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for both monolingual and bilingualspeakers. Very high correlations were found between monolingual and bilingual speakers withrespect to the probability of knowing a word, which was strongly related to the input frequency inprimary education.

Topic choice, topic synchrony, and utterance function during mother–child playsessions at age 3 were examined in 32 late talkers (identified at 24 to 31 months) and 21comparison children, matched at intake on age, SES, and nonverbal ability. At age 3, late talkershad significantly lower MLUs and IPSyn scores than comparison children. Late talkers andcomparison children did not differ in number of utterances, topic initiation, topic synchrony, useof commands, reactions to commands, or conversational fillers. However, late talkers askedsignificantly fewer questions, provided fewer answers to maternal questions, made fewerdeclarative statements, and were less likely to elaborate on their own topic than comparisonchildren. Mothers of late talkers produced significantly more utterances and asked many morequestions, but otherwise they did not differ from mothers of comparison children. In both groups,children and mothers were highly synchronous. When late talkers were divided into two groups(children with continuing delay vs. “late bloomers” who were within the normalrange in MLU), the subgroups did not differ significantly from each other on any conversationalmeasure.

We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions – the double-objectdative, the to dative, and the for dative – in the spontaneous speechof seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, thedouble-object dative was acquired by most of the children before either of the prepositionaldatives; this was attributed to the greater frequency with which children heard this constructionwith individual verbs. Second, the verbs children used with these constructions were not only theadult prototypical ones, but also a number of the less prototypical ones; again, this was very likelydue to their frequency and saliency in the language children heard. Third, no support was foundfor Ninio's (1999) analysis of the emergence of constructions in terms of a single“pathbreaking” verb; rather, children began using the double-object dative withmany different verbs and did not follow the trajectory proposed by Ninio (i.e., a single verb isused for some months before an “explosion” of new verbs is introduced in theconstruction). Finally, most of the verbs initially used in the three dative constructions were firstused in other constructions (e.g., a simple transitive); this was even true for some obligatorydatives, such as give and show. The current results provide a starting pointfor determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions andfor explicating how children understand the interrelations among these and other constructions.

“On 4 November 1995 Kasabe existed; on 5 November it did not.” This briefobituary in David Crystal's book (p. 1) does not refer to a creature. It refers to an Africanlanguage, known as Luo, that had been spoken in Cameroon; on the day in question, Bogon, thelast speaker of Kasabe, died, taking his language with him. According to Crystal, half of theworld's current languages are in danger of dying, and the situation is so grave that aninternational and interdisciplinary effort must be mounted to rescue them. Crystal has written thisbook to alert us to the peril and to suggest ways in which our linguistic diversity might bemaintained.

This stimulating volume is the outcome of a 1996 conference, the first in the laboratoryphonology series to incorporate psycholinguistic topics, including six chapters addressingacquisition. Here, as in the earlier conferences, the primary focus is on the relationship betweenphonetics and phonology. For example, in the first section, “Articulation and MentalRepresentation,” Munhall, Kawato, and Vatikiotis-Bateson provide a lucid account of thestate of the art in physical models of articulation; they conclude with a discussion of the difficultyof identifying the interface between phonology and speech production. In a related study, therelevance of overarching prosodic structure (“phrasal signatures”) to low-levelarticulatory effects is illustrated in some detail by Byrd, Kaun, Narayanan, and Saltzman, who findthat “prosodic structure is manifest in the details of articulation. . . . The abstract symbolicrepresentation useful to linguistics [must be integrated] with a dynamical model ofhuman movement useful to speech scientists” (p. 85).

Judith Rosenthal has brought together a wide variety of articles on second language (L2)teaching and learning that will surely interest foreign language (FL) educators in U.S. universitieswho are struggling to increase or maintain enrollment in their courses or who are seeking newideas to meet the needs and demands of an increasingly diverse student population. Rather thanencourage individual language departments to continue their separate battles for survival,Rosenthal hopes to enhance the “integration” of FL programs in order “tobetter promote proficiency in more than one language” (p. 353). This volume clearlyillustrates how teachers of various languages can collaborate and share experiences in order tofind solutions to what are often very similar problems.