Oral language predictors of word reading and spelling: A cross-linguistic comparison in bilingual and monolingual children.

The current study investigated linguistic predictors of word reading and spelling skills in a cross-linguistic comparison (French vs. Italian) in heritage bilinguals (HBs) and their monolingual peers. The sample included 265 children (French: n = 113; 67 monolinguals and 46 HBs; Italian: n = 152; 82 monolinguals and 70 HBs) attending Grades 3, 4, and 5 while performing oral language, reading, and spelling tasks. The battery included verbal knowledge, morphosyntactic comprehension, nonword repetition, word reading (speed and accuracy), and spelling tasks. Results showed that for reading speed, there were no main effects of single predictors, but a significant interaction of morphosyntactic comprehension by language of schooling emerged. For reading accuracy, there was a main effect of verbal knowledge and syntactic comprehension, with a significant interaction of verbal knowledge and language of schooling. Finally, spelling accuracy was predicted only by linguistic status. The results suggest different pathways for word reading and spelling, with oral language skills' main role in reading accuracy and linguistic status's main role in spelling skills, possibly hindered by linguistic exposure and lexical access. Discussions are focused on potential implications for multilingual settings and cross-linguistic research.

Effects of Emotional Valence and Concreteness on Children's Recognition Memory.

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence (negative, neutral, and positive). Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words (a negativity effect), whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words (a negativity effect and a positivity effect). In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children's lexical development.

Relating Lexical and Syntactic Knowledge to Academic English Listening: The Importance of Construct Representation.

This study aims to resolve contradictory conclusions on the relative importance of lexical and syntactic knowledge in second language (L2) listening with evidence from academic English. It was hypothesized that when lexical and syntactic knowledge is measured in auditory receptive tasks contextualized in natural discourse, the measures will be more relevant to L2 listening, so that both lexical and syntactic knowledge will have unique contributions to L2 listening. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative study was designed, in which lexical and syntactic knowledge was measured via partial dictation, an auditory receptive task contextualized in a discourse context. Academic English listening was measured via a retired IELTS listening test. A group of 258 college-level native Chinese learners of English completed these tasks. Pearson correlations showed that both lexical and syntactic measures correlated strongly with English listening (r = 0.77 and r = 0.67 respectively). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both measures jointly explained 62% of the variance in the listening score and that each measure had its unique contribution. These results demonstrated the importance of considering construct representation substantially and using measures that well reflect constructs in practical research.

How Do French-English Bilinguals Pull Verb Particle Constructions Off? Factors Influencing Second Language Processing of Unfamiliar Structures at the Syntax-Semantics Interface.

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of VPCs (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g., The professor looked the student's last name up). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals' reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with VPCs that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers' reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants' English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants' explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty.

Separability of Lexical and Morphological Knowledge: Evidence from Language Minority Children.

Lexical and morphological knowledge of school-aged children are correlated with each other, and are often difficult to distinguish. One reason for this might be that many tasks currently used to assess morphological knowledge require children to inflect or derive real words in the language, thus recruiting their vocabulary knowledge. The current study investigated the possible separability of lexical and morphological knowledge using two complementary approaches. First, we examined the correlations between vocabulary and four morphological tasks tapping different aspects of morphological processing and awareness, and using either real-word or pseudo-word stimuli. Thus, we tested the hypothesis that different morphological tasks recruit lexical knowledge to various degrees. Second, we compared the Hebrew vocabulary and morphological knowledge of 5th grade language minority speaking children to that of their native speaking peers. This comparison allows us to ask whether reduced exposure to the societal language might differentially influence vocabulary and morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate that indeed different morphological tasks rely on lexical knowledge to varying degrees. In addition, language minority students had significantly lower performance in vocabulary and in morphological tasks that recruited vocabulary knowledge to a greater extent. In contrast, both groups performed similarly in abstract morphological tasks with a lower vocabulary load. These results demonstrate that lexical and morphological knowledge may rely on partially separable learning mechanisms, and highlight the importance of distinguishing between these two linguistic components.

Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children on the LITMUS-CLT task.

While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.

El desarrollo de la escritura de palabras en español: Interacción entre el conocimiento fonológico y ortográfico / Spelling development in Spanish: Interaction between phonological and orthographic knowledge

El presente trabajo se propone ampliar los conocimientos acerca de las estrategias léxicas y fonológicas que utilizan los niños en la tarea de escritura de palabras en español, durante los primeros años de escolaridad. Para ello se analizó en dos experimentos, cómo incidían las variables de complejidad, extensión y frecuencia, así como el conocimiento ortográfico en el aprendizaje temprano de la escritura. En el primer experimento la variable ortográfica no fue considerada de manera específica, por lo que se diseñó y aplicó un segundo experimento. En el experimento dos se evaluó la incidencia del conocimiento léxico al comparar la adquisición de correspondencias consistentes e inconsistentes, dependientes e independientes del contexto. Las pruebas de escritura de palabras se aplicaron al finalizar el primer año y segundo año de Enseñanza General Básica (EGB). En los resultados, a finales de primer año, no se encontró un efecto de frecuencia, pero se observó, en cambio, una fuerte incidencia de la complejidad y la longitud en el desempeño de los niños, lo que puso de manifiesto que los mecanismos fonológicos son fundamentales en la primera etapa de aprendizaje de la escritura. Asimismo, se advirtió que los mecanismos léxicos son relativamente tardíos y se adquieren gradualmente. Sólo a finales de segundo año se encontró una interacción entre los mecanismos fonológicos y léxicos. Las implicancias pedagógicas del estudio fueron también consideradas.

This study analyzed the acquisition of word spelling strategies in Spanish-speaking children, during the first two years of elementary education. The cognitive word spelling models, initially developed for English, describe different stages in the acquisition spelling process. In the first stage, children write by memory, reproducing visual cues. At a second stage, children analyze the phonological structure of the word. Finally, in an orthographic stage, children can write words, using lexical information, without phonological mediation (Frith, 1984, 1985; Marsh, Friedman, Welch & Desberg, 1980). Even when the stages theory was discussed, these first studies allowed the identification of early lexical strategies and phonological mechanisms implied in the English word spelling processes. However, English is a language with a deep orthography, and the phonological strategy is a necessary mechanism but it is not enough to spell words properly. On the contrary, the Spanish orthographic system is shallow, and the phonemes-graphemes correspondences are very regular. Consequently, the spelling strategies could be different in these two languages, and the models developed for English would partially explain the orthographic learning process in transparent languages. This work aims to contribute to the knowledge on early spelling word strategies in Spanish. In two experiments, first and second grade children were given spelling tests designed to explore their phonological and orthographic knowledge. In the first experiment, the incidence of word complexity, length and frequency on spelling performance was explored. However, there was a possibility that, if children performed better in frequent words spelling, in relation to less frequent, they were resorting to their lexical knowledge. In this case, children were using an orthographic-lexical strategy. On the other hand, the possibility of writing complex and long words is associated to the phonological awareness level and correspondence knowledge. If children were able to easily write frequent and non frequent short and simple words, but had difficulties in writing long and complex words, they were possibly analyzing the sounds of the words and thus activating the corresponding letters. If the word was long or complex and the phonological skills were not well developed, children would have difficulties in writing them; one such problem, for example, would be in omitting letters. In this case, complexity and length variables that show the use of an analytic strategy would be influencing the performance. In the first experiment, the orthographic variable was not considered specifically, so a second experiment was designed. The second experiment evaluated orthographic knowledge, considering the orthographic characteristics of the words. The acquisition of the consistent and inconsistent correspondences was compared. The consistent correspondences could be solved using transcription rules, while inconsistent correspondences could be written only through lexical knowledge. Furthermore, consistent correspondences could be independent or dependent from context. In the first case, we refer to phonemes that are always represented with the same letter. In the other case, transcription depends on the syllabic context. Tests were applied at the end of the first and the second year of primary education. Results of the first experiment showed that, at the end of the first year, there was no frequency effect but the variables of complexity and length affected the children's performance. At the end of the second year, a frequency effect and a significant interaction between complexity and frequency were found. In the second experiment, a significant consistence effect was observed, but there was no frequency effect. These results indicate that phonological strategies are fundamental in the beginning of spelling acquisition. On the contrary, lexical mechanisms appear later and they are acquired gradually. Indeed, at the end of the first grade, frequency only affected performance of context dependent correspondences, but not independent. Likewise, interaction between phonological and lexical strategies was found only at the end of the second year. Pedagogical implications were also considered.

A selective impairment in the phonological output lexicon.

It has been proposed that words are stored in a functional structure which consists of a semantic system and modality-specific input and output lexicons. We report a patient with disturbed word finding for given letters, but not for specific categories. The patient had difficulty in phonological similarity judgements of pictures, but performed normally on semantic similarity judgements. We conclude that this patient's impairments stemmed from a disturbance restricted to the subsystem for active judgement and selection of representations in the phonological output lexicon.