Helen Smith Cairns

The effects of phonotactic constraints on lexical processing in bilingual and monolingual subjects

Two questions of bilingual language processing are addressed: (1) Does the fluent bilingual have one unified language processing system, used for processing both languages, or two processing systems, one for each language? (2) If the bilingual has two processing systems, are both activated during language processing (the Interaction Hypothesis) or is one selectively deactivated according to language mode (the Independence Hypothesis)? These questions are addressed with respect to the bilinguals use of phonotactic constraints during lexical processing. The results of judgment tasks and lexical decision tasks conducted with English—German bilinguals indicate that the bilingual has a knowledge of two sets of phonotactic constraints and support the hypothesis that both sets of constraints are simultaneously available to the bilingual during processing.

Lexical information processing during sentence comprehension

This article reports two experiments, a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment, conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from the same population. There are three major conclusions: ( a ) That in the case of ambiguous lexical items, all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to working memory; ( b ) that the two experimental tasks investigated do not tap the same psycholinguistic processes; and ( c ) that there is a lexical retrieval stage operable in both comprehension and production which affects response latencies.

Sentence comprehension limitations related to syntactic deficits in reading-disabled children

Twenty reading-disabled children, ages 7 through 10, were compared with 20 nondisabled readers of the same age range according to their ability to interpret complex sentences. Using a relatively new metric, subjects were classified according to Grammar Type and the extent to which they obeyed the c-command constraint on control in interpreting sentences containing embedded complements with missing subjects. The results demonstrated that the nondisabled readers performed at higher levels of grammatical development than did the reading-impaired subjects; there was no effect for age. Implications are made regarding the structural nature of the syntactic deficit in the reading-disabled population studied.

Who, why, when, and how : a development study *

Fifty children between the ages of 3; 0 and 5; 6 were asked six types of wh- questions following videotaped sequences. It is argued that differential difficulty of various forms of who questions supports a parallel model of information retrieval and processing during discourse. The differential difficulty of why and when questions are, however, attributable to a necessary progression in the ability to encode the relevant concepts linguistically. Responses to how questions are difficult because they involve a number of unrelated skills.

The development of grammars underlying children's interpretation of complex sentences

Abstract It is argued that childrens knowledge of the structure of multiple clause sentences and the rules governing control of missing complement subjects (PRO) can be described in terms of four grammar types which constitute separate developmental stages. These grammar types are believed to develop following an initial stage when children rely on a strategy to interpret multiple clause sentences. In order to test this hypothesis, 64 children ranging from 3;2 to 8;3 years of age were interviewed on four separate occassions. During the first interview a spontaneous language sample was collected and a Developmental Sentence Score (DSS), a measure of grammatical development, was obtained for each child. During the second and third interviews each child was askedto act out a total of 45 complex sentences. Fifty of the children returned for a fourth interview which included an acting out task and a judgment task. The five stages were associated, a priori, with specific patterns of control and the children were classified according to either grammar type or use of the initial strategy on the basis of their response patterns to a selected set of the 45 experimental constructions. The hypothesis of the four grammar types and their sequential development was supported by the fact that the children belonging to each grammar type differed significantly with respect to age and DSS scores. Furthermore, all the means were sequentially ordered in the predicted direction. Tests involving the relationship of grammar type to (1) reliability of response patterns across interviews, and (2) ability to identify semantically deviant sentences provided independent support for the theory of the four grammar types. There was only limited support for the existence of the initial stage.

Grammatical knowledge of third grade good and poor readers

The relationship between grammatical knowledge and reading ability in third grade good and poor readers was investigated. Two aspects of grammar – binding and control – were assessed to determine whether poor readers had syntactic deficits. These principles both relate to the interpretation of pronominal elements. Interpretations were assessed through a sentence–picture matching task in which picture depictions of all the possible interpretations of pronominal elements in verbally presented sentences were included. The only sentence type that differentiated the two reading groups was performance on sentences related to one of the binding principles, Principle B. Since obedience to Principle B probably involves pragmatic as well as syntactic principles, this finding suggests another way that good readers may differ from poor readers.

Effects of prior context upon the integration of lexical information during sentence processing

In three experiments it is shown that predictive context both facilitates the processing of unambiguous lexical items in sentences and makes their representation in the final conceptual representation of the sentence less salient. Facilitation is demonstrated in Experiments I and II using measures of sentence comprehension time and phoneme monitoring latency. The latter effect is demonstrated by showing in Experiment III that longer probe latencies are associated with words which were initially processed in a predictive, as opposed to non-predictive, context. An integration account of the effects of context on lexical processing is adduced to account for the reported findings.

The development of infinitives from three to five

This study investigated the form of infinitival sentences produced by young children and their knowledge of the control properties of this sentence form. Twenty-five children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4 participated in a story completion task designed to elicit infinitive sentences and in an act-out comprehension task. Although the infinitive form was productive for even the youngest children in this study, development of this form was not complete even for the five-year-olds, nor did any child demonstrate adult knowledge of control. In addition, two competing claims regarding order of acquisition (that of Limber, 1973, and Hyams, 1985) were evaluated.

The Development of NP Selection in School-Age Children: Reference and Spanish Subject Pronouns

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the stories, overt pronouns in same-reference were redundant, and null pronouns in switch-reference rendered reference ambiguous. Adult participants preferred null pronouns in same-reference contexts and overt pronouns in switch-reference contexts, demonstrating an avoidance of redundancy and ambiguity. Children demonstrated a tolerance for redundancy well into adolescence. A tolerance for ambiguous reference declined at age eight/nine and then progressively decreased with age. We interpret the tolerance for ambiguity as an indication that children have difficulty with perspective taking when faced with complex structures and tasks.

Detecting the Ambiguity of Sentences: Relationship to Early Reading Skill

The authors of this article report on a preliminary study of 18, 4- and 5-year-old children, followed by a longitudinal study of 44 children, who were tested in the first, second, and third grades. The childrens ability to detect the ambiguity of lexically ambiguous sentences (e.g., “The children saw the bat lying by the fence”) and structurally ambiguous sentences (e.g., “The girl tickled the baby with the teddy bear”) was assessed in the preliminary study and in Experiments 1 and 2, which were conducted when the children were in the first and second grades, respectively. Ambiguity detection skill was found to be related to first-grade reading readiness and to second- and third-grade reading achievement. The results suggest that the detection of lexical ambiguity develops in first grade, correlates highly with reading readiness measures, and is a strong predictor of second-grade reading ability, indicating that it is a precursor of reading skill. In this study, the ability to detect structural ambiguity emerged in second grade and was a predictor of third-grade reading ability. Clinical implications for the use of ambiguity detection tasks to identify children who are at risk for reading difficulty are discussed.