Component processes of early reading, spelling, and narrative writing skills in Turkish: a longitudinal study

The study examined: (a) the role of phonological, grammatical, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills in reading and spelling development; and (b) the component processes of early narrative writing skills. Fifty-seven Turkish-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. RAN was the most powerful longitudinal predictor of reading speed and its effect was evident even when previous reading skills were taken into account. Broadly, the phonological and grammatical skills made reliable contributions to spelling performance but their effects were completely mediated by previous spelling skills. Different aspects of the narrative writing skills were related to different processing skills. While handwriting speed predicted writing fluency, spelling accuracy predicted spelling error rate. Vocabulary and working memory were the only reliable longitudinal predictors of the quality of composition content. The overall model, however, failed to explain any reliable variance in the structural quality of the compositions

The prompt hypothesis: clarification requests as corrective input for grammatical errors

The potential of clarification questions (CQs) to act as a form of corrective input for young children's grammatical errors was examined. Corrective responses were operationalized as those occasions when child speech shifted from erroneous to correct (E -> C) contingent on a clarification question. It was predicted that E -> C sequences would prevail over shifts in the opposite direction (C -> E), as can occur in the case of nonerror-contingent CQs. This prediction was tested via a standard intervention paradigm, whereby every 60s a sequence of two clarification requests (either specific or general) was introduced into conversation with a total of 45 2- and 4-year-old children. For 10 categories of grammatical structure, E -> C sequences predominated over their C -> E counterparts, with levels of E -> C shifts increasing after two clarification questions. Children were also more reluctant to repeat erroneous forms than their correct counterparts, following the intervention of CQs. The findings provide support for Saxton's prompt hypothesis, which predicts that error-contingent CQs bear the potential to cue recall of previously acquired grammatical forms.

Passive verb morphology: the effect of phonotactics on passive comprehension in typically developing and grammatical-SLI children

In this study we explore the impact of a morphological deficit on syntactic comprehension. A self-paced listening task was designed to investigate passive sentence processing in typically developing (TD) children and children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). Participants had to judge whether the sentence they heard matched a picture they were shown. Working within the framework of the Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypothesis, which stresses how different components of the grammar interact, we tested whether children were able to use phonotactic cues to parse reversible passive sentences of the form the X was verbed by Y We predicted that TD children would be able to use phonotactics to parse a form like touched or hugged as a participle, and hence interpret passive sentences correctly. This cue is predicted not be used by G-SLI children, because they have difficulty building complex morphological representations. We demonstrate that indeed TD, but not G-SLI, children are able to use phonotactics cues in parsing passive sentences. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Grammatical collocations and verb-particle constructions in Brussels French: a corpus-linguistic approach to transfer

In this study the focus is on transfer in Brussels French, the variety of French spoken in Brussels. The methodology proposed in Jarvis (2000) and Jarvis and Pavlenko (2009) is followed to provide proof for the fact that grammatical collocations such as chercher après "to look for" are the result of contact with the source language, Brussels Dutch.

Does SMS text messaging help or harm adults’ knowledge of standard spelling?

The recent increase in short messaging system (SMS) text messaging, often using abbreviated, non-conventional ‘textisms’ (e.g. ‘2nite’), in school-aged children has raised fears of negative consequences of such technology for literacy. The current research used a paradigm developed by Dixon and Kaminska, who showed that exposure to phonetically plausible misspellings (e.g. ‘recieve’) negatively affected subsequent spelling performance, though this was true only with adults, not children. The current research extends this work to directly investigate the effects of exposure to textisms, misspellings and correctly spelledwords on adults’ spelling. Spelling of a set of key words was assessed both before and after an exposure phase where participants read the same key words, presented either as textisms (e.g. ‘2nite’), correctly spelled (e.g. ‘tonight’) or misspelled (e.g. 'tonite’)words. Analysis showed that scores decreased from pre- to post-test following exposure to misspellings, whereas performance improved following exposure to correctly spelled words and, interestingly, to textisms. Data suggest that exposure to textisms, unlike misspellings, had a positive effect on adults’ spelling. These findings are interpreted in light of other recent research suggesting a positive relationship between texting and some literacy measures in school-aged children.

The relationship between rapid naming and word spelling in English

A study of the concurrent relationships between naming speed, phonological awareness and spelling ability in 146 children in Year 3 and 4 of state funded school in SE England (equivalent to US Grades 2 and 3) is reported. Seventy-two children identified as having normal phonological awareness but reduced rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance (1 standard deviation below the mean) participated in the study. A group of 74 children were further identified. These children were matched on phonological awareness, verbal and non verbal IQ, and visual acuity but all members of this group showed normal rapid automatized naming performance. Rapid automatized naming made a significant unique contribution to spelling performance. Further analyses showed that the participants with low naming performance were significantly poorer spellers overall and had a specific difficulty in spelling irregular words. The findings support the view that rapid automatized naming may be indexing processes that are implicated in the establishment of fully specified orthographic representations.

Does grammatical aspect affect motion event cognition? A cross-linguistic comparison of English and Swedish speakers

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

Language and thought in bilinguals: the case of grammatical number and nonverbal classification preferences

Recent research shows that speakers of languages with obligatory plural marking (English) preferentially categorize objects based on common shape, whereas speakers of nonplural-marking classifier languages (Yucatec and Japanese) preferentially categorize objects based on common material. The current study extends that investigation to the domain of bilingualism. Japanese and English monolinguals, and Japanese–English bilinguals were asked to match novel objects based on either common shape or color. Results showed that English monolinguals selected shape significantly more than Japanese monolinguals, whereas the bilinguals shifted their cognitive preferences as a function of their second language proficiency. The implications of these findings for conceptual representation and cognitive processing in bilinguals are discussed.

Motion event cognition and grammatical aspect: evidence from Afrikaans

Research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion event construal has posited that speakers of non-aspect languages are more prone to encoding event endpoints than are speakers of aspect languages (e.g., von Stutterheim and Carroll 2011). In the present study, we test this hypothesis by extending this line of inquiry to Afrikaans, a non-aspect language which is previously unexplored in this regard. Motion endpoint behavior among Afrikaans speakers was measured by means of a linguistic retelling task and a non-linguistic similarity judgment task, and then compared with the behavior of speakers of a non-aspect language (Swedish) and speakers of an aspect language (English). Results showed the Afrikaans speakers' endpoint patterns aligned with Swedish patterns, but were significantly different from English patterns. It was also found that the variation among the Afrikaans speakers could be partially explained by taking into account their frequency of use of English, such that those who used English more frequently exhibited an endpoint behavior that was more similar to English speakers. The current study thus lends further support to the hypothesis that speakers of different languages attend differently to event endpoints as a function of the grammatical category of aspect.

Unconscious effects of grammatical gender during object categorisation

Does language modulate perception and categorisation of everyday objects? Here, we approach this question from the perspective of grammatical gender in bilinguals. We tested Spanish–English bilinguals and control native speakers of English in a semantic categorisation task on triplets of pictures in an all-in-English context while measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to press a button when the third picture of a triplet belonged to the same semantic category as the first two, and another button when it belonged to a different category. Unbeknownst to them, in half of the trials, the gender of the third picture name in Spanish had the same gender as that of the first two, and the opposite gender in the other half. We found no priming in behavioural results of either semantic relatedness or gender consistency. In contrast, ERPs revealed not only the expected semantic priming effect in both groups, but also a negative modulation by gender inconsistency in Spanish–English bilinguals, exclusively. These results provide evidence for spontaneous and unconscious access to grammatical gender in participants functioning in a context requiring no access to such information, thereby providing support for linguistic relativity effects in the grammatical domain.

Interaction between grammatical categories and cognition in bilinguals: The role of proficiency, cultural immersion, and language of instruction

Previous studies have demonstrated that there is a tight link between grammatical concepts and cognitive preferences in monolingual speakers (Lucy 1992, Lucy & Gaskins 2003, Imai & Gentner 1997, Imai & Mazuka 2003). Recent research has also shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may shift their cognitive preferences as a function of their proficiency (Athanasopoulos, 2006) or cultural immersion (Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006). The current short paper assesses the relative impact of each of these variables, and furthermore asks whether bilinguals alternate between two distinct cognitive representations of language-specific concepts depending on the language used in the experiment. Results from an object classification task showed that Japanese–English bilinguals shifted their behaviour towards the second language (L2) pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency, while cultural immersion and language of instruction played a minimal role. These findings suggest that acquisition of novel grammatical categories leads to cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind and have implications for the relationship between language and cognitive processing.

An investigation of working memory effects on oral grammatical accuracy and fluency in producing questions in English

This article addresses the question of how far working memory may affect second language (L2) learners' improvement in spoken language during a period of immersion. Research is presented testing the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are associated with individual variation in improvements in oral production of questions in English. Thirty-two Chinese adult speakers of English were tested, before and after a year's postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, to measure grammatical accuracy and fluency using a question elicitation task, and to measure WM using a battery of first language (L1) and L2 WM tests. Story recall in L1 (Mandarin) was significantly associated with individuals' improvement in oral grammatical measures (p < .05). However, there was no significant mean improvement across the cohort in grammatical accuracy, although there was for fluency. The findings suggest that WM may aid certain aspects of individuals' L2 oral proficiency during academic immersion through postgraduate study. They also indicate that academic immersion in itself can lead to improvements in oral proficiency, independent of WM capacity, but there is no general guarantee of significant grammatical change. Further research to clarify the opportunities for input and interaction available in academic immersion settings is called for.